RegEx find matching string variable within string up to a point and replace with another string

Question

Example text that I am dealing with. This text is a tooltip that is stored in a database that a user can edit using a WYSIWYG editor.

Example tooltip:

BlahBlahBlahBlahBlahBlahBlahBlahBlahBlahBlahBlah
BlahBlahBlahBlah <a href="[SOME_COMPLETE URL]">BlahBlah</a>
BlahBlahBlahBlahBlahBlahBlahBlah

In short I need to replace that href to a javascript function in my app:

<a href="www.myurl.com/page/page/page">BlahBlah</a>

goes to:

<a href="javascript:void(0);" onclick="openOrFocus('www.myurl.com/page/page/page', 'windowName')">BlahBlah</a>

I'm trying to write a RegEx expression to find the href tag, get everything between the quotes. I then need to replace everything between the quotes using the above code and put the URL in the function call.

Here's what I've tried to far but it does not work (I struggle with Regular Expressions)

myTooltipText.replaceAll(".*href\\s*=\\s*\(.*)\"","href=\"javascript:void(0);\" onclick="openOrFocus('[SOME_COMPLETE_URL]', 'windowName')";

I'm using Java and Groovy.

Edit: The URL's are never the same; they change per tooltip as they go to an in depth context help.

The .* should be .*? to make them none-greedy

gwillie
– gwillie

2013-12-18 22:54:24 +00:00
Commented Dec 18, 2013 at 22:54 — gwillie
– gwillie, Commented Dec 18, 2013 at 22:54
added the ? to both spots and it isn't matching anything.

Vaesive
– Vaesive

2013-12-18 23:09:39 +00:00
Commented Dec 18, 2013 at 23:09 — Vaesive
– Vaesive, Commented Dec 18, 2013 at 23:09

hwnd · Accepted Answer · 2013-12-18 23:39:41Z

1

You don't need .* before href and you're trying to escape your left parenthesis on your capturing group it looks like. You also missed escaping a quotation inside your replacement text, and left off your ending parenthesis ) at the end of your replaceAll function.

Try the following, this captures between your quotes and references to capture group $1 in the replacement.

myTooltipText.replaceAll("href\\s*=\\s*\"([^\"]*)\"", "href=\"javascript:void(0);\" onclick=\"openOrFocus('$1', 'windowName')\"");

See Working demo

edited Dec 18, 2013 at 23:39

answered Dec 18, 2013 at 23:15

hwnd

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1 Comment

Vaesive Over a year ago

Thank you so much, that worked perfectly! One of my issues was I wasn't setting the myTooltip variable to the replace all (noob mistake) and I needed to escape the dollar sign. Thank you again for your help!

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