Sublime Text regex to find and replace whitespace between two xml or html tags?

Question

I'm using Sublime Text and I need to come up with a regex that will find the whitespaces between a certain opening and closing tag and replace them with commas.

Example: Replace white space in

<tags>This is an example</tags>

so it becomes

<tags>This,is,an,example</tags>

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can replace any one or more whitespace chunks in between two tags using a single regular expression:

(?s)(?:\G(?!\A)|<tags>(?=.*?</tags>))(?:(?!</?tags>).)*?\K\s+

See the regex demo. Details

• (?s) - a DOTALL inline modifier, makes . match line breaks
• (?:\G(?!\A)|<tags>(?=.*?</tags>)) - either the end of the previous successful match (\G(?!\A)) or (|) <tags> substring that is immediately followed with any zero or more chars, as few as possible and then </tags> (see (?=.*?</tags>))
• (?:(?!</?tags>).)*? - any char that does not start a <tags> or </tags> substrings, zero or more occurrences but as few as possible
• \K - match reset operator
• \s+ - one or more whitespaces (NOTE: use \s if each whitespace must be replaced).

SublimeText settings:

Answer 2

This will find instances of

<tags>...</tags> 

with whitespace between the tags

(<tags>\S+)\W(.+</tags>)

This will replace the first whitespace with a comma

\1,\2

Open Find and Replace [OS X Cmd+Opt+F :: Windows Ctrl+H]

Use the two values above to find and replace and use the 'Replace All' option. Repeat until all the whitespaces are converted to commas.

The best answer is probably a quick script but this will get you there fairly fast without needing to do any coding.

Answer 3

You have just to use a simple regex like:

\s+

And replace it with with a comma.

Working demo