matching only bold tag with regular expression

Question

I am trying to match the <b> tag or <b style="....."> by using a regular expression like

<(/)?(b)[^>]*>

it not only matches the b tag but all the tags starting with b

[Obligatory link whenever someone wants to use regular expressions for parsing HTML](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454). — Philipp, Mar 31 '14 at 15:57
Just to partially justify such a question is one use of a regex just MIGHT be usage in a editor like Visual Studio where you want to find/edit a mass of stuff in a solution. — Mark Schultheiss, Apr 27 '18 at 15:20

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 31 '14 at 15:56

1

Try using a word boundary (\b):

<(/)?(b\b)[^>]*>

This ensures that the next character after the <b must not be a 'word' character (a letter, number or underscore).

Of course, this could match a tag like <b-foo>, which might be a concern. In that case, I'd recommend using a lookahead like this:

<(/)?(b(?=[\s>]))[^>]*>

This ensures that the next character after the <b must either be a whitespace character, or a >.

answered Mar 31 '14 at 15:56

p.s.w.g

Or just make the RegEx match a proper "" tag: `<(/)?(b)>`. Inline styling on a "" tag is simply bad practice. – tenub Mar 31 '14 at 15:57
1

`<(/)?(b)(?:\s+[^>]*)?>` – tenub Mar 31 '14 at 16:00
1

@tenub yup, that would be a valid solution. Feel free to post that as an answer. – p.s.w.g Mar 31 '14 at 16:02

Amit Joki · Answer 2 · 2018-04-30T07:20:53.540

0

Why don't you use this:

/<\/?b.*?>/g

Your regex:

/<(\/)?(b)[^>]*>/g

You may want to use the global modifier as per the syntax of your language of use. The one I've used is Javascript.

edited Apr 30 '18 at 07:20

answered Mar 31 '14 at 15:57

Amit Joki

"but I think both my and your regex needs global modifier. g" OK so add that, with the assumption they do NOT know how. – Mark Schultheiss Apr 27 '18 at 15:22

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 27 '18 at 15:00

0

In JavaScript, to find and replace all <b> and </b> tags, you'd do something like this:

const myStr = '<b>Hello</b>';
myStr.replace(/<[/]?(b)>/gi, '');
console.log(myStr); // Outputs 'Hello' with the bold tags removed

Hope that helps someone.

answered Apr 27 '18 at 15:00

Sterling Bourne

3 Answers3