regex to insert html tags with out creating invalid html

Question

I have some javascript that is looking at a string of text based on a users selection and wrapping the string in a tag. What I'm looking for a regular expression that would look at the string of text and check for existing html tags in the string, and if they exist, break up the span so that it doesn't invalidate the html.

For example, lets say i have the following text

<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, <i>consectetur adipiscing elit</i>. 
Curabitur tortor risus, facilisis vitae bibendum sit amet, mattis non dui.</p>

And the user selects "amet, consectetur". The string should end up as "amet, consectetur" as opposed tp "amet, consectetur"

It will be difficult to use regex to do the job. Usually regex are a bad idea for HTML parsing. Example: I suspect that if the closing tag appears within the selection you want to create only one span block? In that case, semantic comes into the process and regex will not fit. Look at HTML parsers. — M'vy
– M'vy, Commented Mar 23, 2011 at 15:12

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 10:33:10Z

3

HTML shouldn't be parsed with RegEx. See: RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags

edited May 23, 2017 at 10:33

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answered Mar 23, 2011 at 15:08

Patric

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4 Comments

user50049 Over a year ago

Please elaborate a bit more (without quoting Bobince's now famous rant in its entirety).

cangeceiro Over a year ago

i would love to avoid regex to solve this issue. what would be a better approach?

Joel Lee Over a year ago

+1 for alerting user to problems of using RegEx with HTML. However, note that question you reference also has an answer posted indicating that in certain limited cases it is reasonable to parse HTML with regular expressions. It is categorically true that that you cannot use a regular expression to parse the structure of HTML. But you can use a regex to determine what is a tag and what is text. That is a very different problem. I think the poster's question in this case can, in fact, be handled by a regular expression. (Though there may be better ways to solve the problem.)

Patric Over a year ago

well, the pros and cons are already in the thread mentioned so I won't repeat them. And yes there are cases where parsing html with RegEx can make sense (but is still not recommended). I would recommend having a look at HTML DOM parsers, which seem more natural to me for this task.

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