Regex helper

categories: Uncategorized

I recently had to come up with a regular expression that I could run against an HTML string that would only affect content, not tags or attribute values. I'm no regex master, so after a whole lot of failed attempts, I turned to the Google and found this invaluable regex tester, which also had a bunch of other problems already solved (click on the Samples link at the top). Here's the answer to my particular question that day:

 
/(?![^<]+>)\b(text_to_match)\b/
 

I hate when it's that simple.

2 Responses to “Regex helper”

  1. bob says:
    January 28th, 2008 at 11:16 pm

    Glad you like my regex tester, I’ve delayed improving it, but soon there will be vast improvements. :)
    Viva la Web.

  2. Pelmeshkin says:
    April 8th, 2008 at 9:01 am

    Invaluable indeed. Thanks!

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