Remove attributes with regex. Just attribute value contains special character "<"

Question

I want to remove title attributes in html. but just if the title value has '<' character.

Text to clean: <a href="" title="bla bla bla" /><a href="" title=" bla bl<a bla" />
Output text: <a href="" title="bla bla bla" /><a href="" />

As you can see second title removed from the text because title value contains < char.

pls help

use < instead of < http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20278451/why-i-cant-use-operation-on-my-search-view/20300551#20300551 — Rudresha Parameshappa, Feb 05 '15 at 09:47
[You can't parse HTML with regex](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags?rq=1) — Jamiec, Feb 05 '15 at 09:55
@Jamiec I don't see anything wrong using regex for **that** specific example — Royi Namir, Feb 05 '15 at 10:21

sloth · Accepted Answer · 2015-02-05T10:07:54.720

3

Do yourself a favour and use a HTML parser when working with HTML; for example Html Agility Pack.

Then tasks like this become as easy as:

var html = "<a href=\"\" title=\"bla bla bla\" /><a href=\"\" title=\" bla bl<a bla\" />";

var doc = new HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlDocument();
doc.LoadHtml(html);

// select all nodes with title attribute
foreach (var element in doc.DocumentNode.SelectNodes("//@title"))
    // and remove it
    if (element.Attributes["title"].Value.Contains("<"))
        element.Attributes["title"].Remove();

edited Feb 05 '15 at 10:07

answered Feb 05 '15 at 09:56

sloth

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You've forgot the "<"-check. So something like `if (element.Attributes["title"].Contains("<")){element.Attributes["title"].Remove();}` is needed. – netblognet Feb 05 '15 at 09:58

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 05 '15 at 09:58

A suitable regular expression (in very simple terms) might be:

title="[^"]*<[^"]*"

This means title=" followed by any number of characters that are NOT " then a < then any additional number of characters that are NOT " and finally a "

Then you can use it as follows: (note the quotes have been doubled in C# literal strings)

var test = @"<a href="""" title=""bla bla bla"" /><a href="""" title="" bla bl<a bla"" />";
var expression = @"title=""[^""]*<[^""]*""";
var rx = new Regex(expression);
var result = rx.Replace(test, "");

In my quick test this gives the desired result!

Remove attributes with regex. Just attribute value contains special character "<"

2 Answers2