Any regular expression experts?

mewso

I use a thing called the widgEditor for html editing in a browser mainly because it's unobtrusive and degrades nicely. Anyway I decided to allow tables to be pasted into the thing. The code in the widgEditor automatically cleans pasted word or excel stuff and does a nice job. It removes tables though so I have stopped it doing this. One bit:-

[SIZE=2]theHTML = theHTML.replace(/(<[^\/]>|<[^\/][^>]*[^\/]>)\s*<\/[^>]*>/g, [/SIZE][SIZE=2][COLOR=#800000]""[/COLOR][/SIZE][SIZE=2]);[/SIZE]
[SIZE=2]

[/SIZE]

strips out all empty tags. Now I need to strip all empty tags except empty td tags as this would be allowed. Any regex experts know what to change here?

Mutant_Fruit

This might help: http://www.regular-expressions.info/conditional.html

Basically what you want to do is something like:
if(tag is not td) then (remove tag if it's empty)

I'd attempt to write it, but the actual regex syntax changes between languages, so i'd be wasting my time Plus, it'd take me a while. If you can't get it figured out, i'll write it up for ya later, and you should be able to translate it then (if it needs translating).

Ginger

I find this very handy

http://tools.osherove.com/CoolTools/Regulazy/tabid/182/Default.aspx

Use it to verify any regexes I need to build

IRLConor

Try:

theHTML = theHTML.replace(/(?:<(?!td)[^>\/]*>\s*<\/(?!td)[^>\/]*>|<(?!td)[^>\/]*\s*\/>)/g, "");

I used the following code to test it:

#!/usr/bin/perl

my $sample = "<tr id=\"foo\"><td><i>foo</i><b id=\"bar\"></b><b /></td><td /><td id=\"baz\"></td></tr><tr id=\"quux\" /><tr></tr>\n";

print $sample;
$sample =~ s/(?:<(?!td)[^>\/]*>\s*<\/(?!td)[^>\/]*>|<(?!td)[^>\/]*\s*\/>)//g;
print $sample;

Edit: I know that Perl's regex dialect is different to Javascript's (which is what I'm assuming you're using) but I think I've only used features that are in the JS dialect.

mewso

Thanks Conor. Works a charm. Was about to sit down and try my hand at this myself but I've always hated regular expressions. Thanks again. Thanks for the links guys. Next time I have a regex problem I promise I'll try it myself

IRLConor

No problem. Glad to be of help.

Mastering Regular Expressions by Jeffrey Friedl is your friend if you need to use regular expressions a lot. Well worth the investment.