Regex match but do not capture with a ".*"

Question

I have two blocks of code.

<TabItem Header="{materialDesign:PackIcon Kind=Bank, Size=24}"
                     Style="{StaticResource MaterialDesignNavigationRailTabItem}"
                     ToolTip="Example">

and

<Button Header="{materialDesign:PackIcon Kind=Bank, Size=24}"
                     Style="{StaticResource MaterialDesignNavigationRailTabItem}"
                     ToolTip="Example">

I to select the ToolTip="Example" part and replace it. However, I only want to select the ToolTip that is inside the TabItem block. I can select it with:

ToolTip\=\"(.*?)\"

That selects the one in the Button block as well. I used this StackOverflow Question to try and solve my issue, but I could not figure out how to make it work with a ".*".

So my criteria is:

Must begin with '<TabItem'
Must contain 'ToolTip=".*"'
Must end with ">"

Is what I am trying to achieve possible? If so, how could I achieve this?

It would be better to use a DOM parsing library than regular expression to process HTML. — Barmar, Feb 09 '22 at 15:38
You can't parse HTML with regular expressions. There's no notion of "inside" or elements in regular expressions. The conditions you described aren't enough to detect an element - what if there are a lot of `TabItem`s? You'd have to match the end tag. But what if `TabItem` is an empty element, ie `` ? What if one of the `TabItem`s hase no tooltip? The regex would keep searching until it found a `Tooltip` no matter where it came from — Panagiotis Kanavos, Feb 09 '22 at 15:39
Why do you need to not capture part of it? If you're doing a replacement, just copy that part into the replacement. — Barmar, Feb 09 '22 at 15:40
@Barmar I want to replace the ToolTip on 100+ instances. But I only want to replace them within the TabItem block. I can do it manually, but I wanted to try and find a regex solution to solve the issue. — shinyshark, Feb 09 '22 at 15:43
Let's say you tried `` as well. If you added the end tag, you wouldn't be able to catch empty elements. — Panagiotis Kanavos, Feb 09 '22 at 15:44

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 09 '22 at 15:44

2

This should work

<TabItem\b[^>]*\bToolTip="([^"]*)"[^>]*>

Using [^>]* ensures that the regexp won't match across multiple tags, and [^"]* won't allow that capture group to go outside the quoted tooltip attribute.

You can't use a lookaround for this, because you'd need a lookbehind to match the part before ToolTip, and lookbehinds have to be fixed length in most regexp engines.

If you're using this in a regexp replacement, put the parts that should be kept in the replacement into capture groups, and then use back-references in the replacement string.

answered Feb 09 '22 at 15:44

Barmar

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1

Wouldn't `ToolTip="(.*?)"` be enough? – Panagiotis Kanavos Feb 09 '22 at 15:46
1

It's probably equivalent. – Barmar Feb 09 '22 at 15:47

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 09 '22 at 15:49

<TabItem.*?ToolTip="(.*?)">

if you use this regex then you will be able to get the value inside the tooltip as a list you can use them in regex with $1 here $1 will be the value inside the first tooltip and $2 will have the second if there is a second match for this regex

Regex match but do not capture with a ".*"

2 Answers2