CODEWITHSUNDEEP
htmlregexanchorhyperlink
Tom
Tom

Reputation: 34366

Find spaces in anchor links

We've got a large amount of static that HTML has links like e.g.

<a href="link.html#glossary">Link</a>

However some of them contain spaces in the anchor e.g.

 <a href="link.html#this is the glossary">Link</a>

Any ideas on what kind of regular expression I'd need to use to find the Spaces after the # and replace them with a - or _

Update: Just need to find them using TextMate, hence no need for a HTML parsing lib.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 914

Answers (3)

Sebastian Hoitz
Sebastian Hoitz

Reputation: 9383

Here, this regex matches the hash and all the words and spaces in between:

#(\w+\s)+\w+

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/5912/Jing/2009-08-12_1651.png

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Upvotes: 1

Mark
Mark

Reputation: 2071

This regex should do it:

#[a-zA-Z]+\s+[a-zA-Z\s]+

Three Caveats.

First, if you are afraid that the page text itself (and not just the links) might contain information like "#hashtag more words", then you could make the regex more restrictive, like this:

#[a-zA-Z]+\s+[a-zA-Z\s]+\">

Second, if you have hash tags that contain characters beyond A-Z, then just add them in between the second set of brackets. So, if you have '-' as well, you would modify to: 

#[a-zA-Z]+\s+[a-zA-Z-\s]+\">

Finally, this assumes that all the links you are trying to match start with a letter/word and are followed by a space, so, in the current form, it would not match "Anchor-tags-galore", but would match "Anchor tags galore."

Upvotes: 2

user122299
user122299

Reputation:

Have you considered using an HTML parsing library like BeautifulSoup? It would make finding all the hrefs much easier!

Upvotes: 2

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