RegEx for PHP Replace certain character between certain HTML tag with another string

Question

this is my first post to stackoverflow, but I've used this amazing site before.

Anyway, I suck at regular expressions but I think I need them for what I need to do.

Short Question: I need to replace the space ' ' with ' ' between any occurrence of <code></code>.

More details:

The motivation behind this was because my code sections were creating extra lines every other line because of the extra spaces (I'm asuming). By replacing the spaces with  , I was able to format the code correctly.

However, this introduced a LOT of extra characters into my HTML. Not only is it inefficient, it also makes word-wrap: break-word; break the words in half rather than move the entire word down.

You can use code in your question by using the syntax. You can also escape specific characters so they appear in your question. The escape character is `\`. — hakre
– hakre, Commented Mar 9, 2012 at 0:55

hakre · Accepted Answer · 2012-03-09 01:11:28Z

1

Do it with CSS instead:

code {white-space: nowrap;} /* or */ code {white-space: pre;}

See white-space CSS property^Docs.

edited Mar 9, 2012 at 1:11

answered Mar 9, 2012 at 0:56

hakre

200k55 gold badges454 silver badges865 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

2 Comments

Max Magee Over a year ago

I tried all of the different white-space css and none of them worked right. I'm not sure what's going on.

hakre Over a year ago

You probably need to convert code into block-mode: code {display: block;} or use it's parent element. See code HTML Element.

Kornel · Accepted Answer · 2012-03-10 18:59:10Z

1

First of all, not regex, but DOM. In PHP that would be:

foreach(DOMDocument::loadHTML($source)->getElementsByTagName('code') as $code) {
    foreach($code->childNodes as $node) {
       // assumes no elements, otherwise check nodeType == 3 
       // and recurse into elements
       $node->textContent = str_replace(" ","\xC2\xA0", $node->textContent);
    }
}

You can (and in DOM need) to use actual space character rather than entity that represents it.

However, those extra lines could be better controlled with:

code {white-space: nowrap;}

or white-space: pre/white-space: pre-line.

CSS solution has advantage of copy&pasteability. Otherwise &nbsp-filled examples will give "WTF!?" parse errors.

Also make sure your CMS/markup converter (if you're using one) doesn't insert <br> automatically that would double lines in <pre>/white-space:pre elements.

edited Mar 10, 2012 at 18:59

answered Mar 9, 2012 at 0:55

Kornel

101k38 gold badges234 silver badges323 bronze badges

5 Comments

hakre Over a year ago

Well, the part how you insert the  's with DOMDocument is actually missing ;)

hakre Over a year ago

DOMDocument uses UTF-8 encoding. "\xa0" is an invalid character for UTF-8 -> utf8 "\xA0" does not map to Unicode. Take care.

Max Magee Over a year ago

I don't know where to put this DOM code. I'm using the CodeIgniter Framework. I'm not sure it'll work easily with how I'm loading my views and stuff. Also, I tried the CSS changes and those didn't work right either. :-/ I really think I'm going to need a way to replace spaces with nbsp when it gets stored in the database but only between the code tags. This is the way the current system works and it renders perfectly if structured like that (I'm building a new system but transferring existing data).

Kornel Over a year ago

@hakre ah, indeed. I've utf-8-ized it. I'd usually just paste literal character.

Kornel Over a year ago

@Max Magee: this code assumes you've got HTML in $source variable. $doc = new DOMDocument(); $doc->loadHTML($source); and $source = $doc->saveHTML(); gives you 2-way conversion.

Scott Weaver · Accepted Answer · 2012-03-09 01:53:47Z

0

disclaimer: in no way do i think this is the solution you will neccessarily arrive at, some other answers already here address what you *should/could otherwise do to accomplish your task.

but let's just assume you DID want to do it with regex. Since I think we can make the assumption that with <code>stuff</code>, stuff won't contain nested code tags, you can accomplish your short question with it, but you still need a couple steps:

//sorry for the c#, the but intent should translate clearly.
string input = @"<div>whatever</div> id='tricky'><code>adsfasd   fasdfasdfvar data = "" 8 5.00000000 8.0 9.000000"";var re = /(\.0{0,2})(0*)/g; var match = re.exec(data);alert(data.replace(re, RegExp.1));</code><p>more stuff with stuff.</p>";
var code = Regex.Match(input, "<code>(.*?)</code>").Value;
var munged = Regex.Replace(code, @"\s", "&nbsp;");
var result = Regex.Replace(input, "<code>(.*?)</code>", munged);

answered Mar 9, 2012 at 1:53

Scott Weaver

7,3832 gold badges33 silver badges45 bronze badges

4 Comments

Frank Farmer Over a year ago

in php, preg_replace_callback would allow you to combine the first and last call to Regex

Max Magee Over a year ago

I tried my best to get regular expressions to work but I have no idea what I'm doing (insert science dog meme here). I need help with the PHP version but instead of the HTML code tags, I need to find the BBCode code tags [code] and [/code] and get the text between those tags so I can replace the spaces.

Max Magee Over a year ago

I ended up getting it with help from someone else [link]stackoverflow.com/questions/9640670/…

Scott Weaver Over a year ago

thanks for noticing it's the exact same approach though :). again, sorry bout the non-php.

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

RegEx for PHP Replace certain character between certain HTML tag with another string

3 Answers 3

2 Comments

5 Comments

4 Comments

Your Answer

Linked

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

3 Answers 3

2 Comments

5 Comments

4 Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Linked

Related