Need a RegEx guru

Question

I'm trying to write a script that parses a block of HTML and matches words against a given glossary of terms. If it finds a match, it wraps the term in <a class="tooltip"></a> and provides a definition.

It's working okay -- except for two major shortcomings:

It matches text that is in attributes
It matches text that is already in an <a> tag, created a nested link.

Is there any way to have my regular expression match only words that are not in attributes, and not in <a> tags?

Here's the code I'm using, in case it's relevant:

foreach(Glossary::map() as $term => $def) {
  $search[] = "/\b($term)\b/i";
  self::$lookup[strtoupper($term)] = $def;
}

return preg_replace_callback($search, array(&$this,'replace'),$this->content);

Edit: That should read "not in A tags".. the HTML got stripped out. It's okay if the text appears in any tag other than an anchor tag. — Aaron, Dec 08 '09 at 19:24
I fixed up the code blocks. When you have inline HTML that you want to have show up, surround with with backticks: ` — Ben S, Dec 08 '09 at 19:25
Don’t do that with a regex. Use some markup to mark the terms and just replace the marked terms with your links (with a parser). — Gumbo, Dec 08 '09 at 19:27
And to actually answer the question, NO there's no such regular expression. — falstro, Dec 08 '09 at 19:30

score 5 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:07

5

"Don't do that with a regex."

Use an HTML parser, then apply a regex to the contents of HTML elements as it identifies them. That will allow you to easily operate on lots of different variants of HTML structure, valid and otherwise, without a lot of cruft and hard-to-maintain regular expressions.

Robust and Mature HTML Parser for PHP

edited May 23 '17 at 12:07

Community

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answered Dec 08 '09 at 19:29

Tim Sylvester

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How did you link to another question on StackOverflow regarding this issue and not link to this one: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454? – jason Dec 08 '09 at 19:32
How did you like to anything without linking to: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001311.html – Ben S Dec 08 '09 at 19:34
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@Jason Because amusing as it may be, it doesn't actually help the OP accomplish anything. – Tim Sylvester Dec 09 '09 at 01:01

score 3 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 10:25

3

Personally, I prefer this answer.

edited May 23 '17 at 10:25

Community

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answered Dec 08 '09 at 19:33

Lee

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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 08 '09 at 19:31

0

HTML parsing is an interesting research topic. What do you mean with HTML? There are standards (quite a few), and there are web pages. Most researchers do not use regular expressions to parse HTML

answered Dec 08 '09 at 19:31

Stephan Eggermont

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Need a RegEx guru

3 Answers3