Regex help required - V2 formatted

Question

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Regex help required

I am trying to replace two or more occurences of <br/> (like <br/><br/><br/>)tags together with two <br/><br/> with the following pattern

Pattern brTagPattern = Pattern.compile("(<\\s*br\\s*/\\s*>\\s*){2,}",
    Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE | Pattern.DOTALL);

But there are some cases where '<br/> <br/>' tags come with a space and they get replaced with 4 <br/> tags which was actually supposed to be replaced with just 2 tags.

What can i do to ignore 2 or 3(few) spaces that come in between the tags ?

Answer 1

You can do that changing a little your regex:

Pattern brTagPattern = Pattern.compile("<\\s*br\\s*/\\s*>\\s*<\\s*br\\s*/\\s*>\\s*", Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE | Pattern.DOTALL);

This will ignore every spaces between two
. If you just want exactly 2 or three, you can use:

Pattern brTagPattern = Pattern.compile("<\\s*br\\s*/\\s*>(\\s){2,3}<\\s*br\\s*/\\s*>\\s*", Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE | Pattern.DOTALL);