JS Regex replacement - replace fixed text around random string

Question

Given this text:

<span class='green'>foobar</span> something <span class='red'>fizzle</span>

I need to somehow attain this:

<tagA>foobar</tagA> something <tabB>fizzle</tagB>

I basically have to match *anything* and be able to differentiate it from the red one as well. I have to take this green span on both ends and replace it with a fixed string, but somehow retain whatever text is between the two tags.

I swear I've looked around a ton but have no idea how to find the solution for this with regex.

Don't use Regex for HTML tags, And what about foofoobarbar ? ;). — shA.t
– shA.t, Commented Aug 12, 2015 at 7:34
It's not for HTML - it's for something else, I'm abstracting the concept so I can explain it easier. — dthree
– dthree, Commented Aug 12, 2015 at 7:35

buckley · Accepted Answer · 2015-08-12 07:45:58Z

1

This should do the trick

Replace

<span class='green'>(.*?)</span>

With

<tagA>$1</tagA>

And do something similar for the class with the value red

Update 1

Response to feedback "What if something contains a newline?"

If I remember correctly JavaScript does not support the "single line mode" / Dot matches line breaks.

<span class='green'>([\s\S]*?)</span>

Update 2

This tweaked regex allows

<span\s+class\s*=\s*['"]green['"]\s*>([^>]*)</\s*span\s*>

white space where the html spec is allowing it
accepts single as well as double quotes for the attribute values
matches the value between the tags using a negated character class which is qualified greedy resulting in better performance generally and is also supported by JavaScript

edited Aug 12, 2015 at 7:45

answered Aug 12, 2015 at 7:35

buckley

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4 Comments

dthree Over a year ago

This looked like it worked - thanks! Simpler than I thought.

Wiktor Stribiżew Over a year ago

What if something contains a newline?

Wiktor Stribiżew Over a year ago

Ok, the only remaining issue is nested tag groups - if there are any. Let OP decide.

buckley Over a year ago

@stribizhev As you know you can get clever with regexes and maybe support nested groups but If this support is needed I would switch to a HTML parsing library.

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