Been trying to solve this for a while now.
I need a regex to strip the newlines, tabs and spaces between the html tags demonstrated in the example below:
Source:
<html>
<head>
<title>
Some title
</title>
</head>
</html>
Wanted result:
<html><head><title>Some title</title></head></html>
The trimming of the whitespaces before the "Some title" is optional. I'd be grateful for any help
If the HTML is strict, load it with an XML reader and write it back without formatting. That will preserve the whitespace within tags, but not between them.
s/\s*(<[^>]+>)\s*/\1/gs
or, in c#:
Regex.Replace(html, "\s*(<[^>]+>)\s*", "$1", RegexOptions.SingleLine);
This removes the whitespace between tags and the space between the tags and the text.
s/(\s*(<))|((>)\s*)/\2\4/g
\d does not match only [0-9] in Perl 5.8 and 5.10; it matches any UNICODE character that has the digit attribute (including "\x{1815}" and "\x{FF15}"). If you mean [0-9] you must either use [0-9] or use the bytes pragma (but it turns all strings in 1 byte characters and is normally not what you want).
Regexes are fundamentally bad at parsing HTML (see Can you provide some examples of why it is hard to parse XML and HTML with a regex? for why). What you need is an HTML parser. See Can you provide an example of parsing HTML with your favorite parser? for examples using a variety of parsers.
You may find the HTMLAgilityPack answer helpful.
I wanted to preserve the new lines, since the removal of newlines was messing up my html. So I went with the following. Check out the results on perfode.com.
private static string ProcessHTMLFile(string input)
{
string opt = Regex.Replace(input, @"( )*", "", RegexOptions.Singleline);
opt = Regex.Replace(opt, @"[\t]*", "", RegexOptions.Singleline);
return opt;
}