very tricky html characters as text

Question

<span class="WorkingHours">
   M,W,Th,F 7:30 AM - 4:00 PM &lt;br /&gt;Tu 7:30 AM - 6:00 PM &lt;br /&gt;
</span>

will be rendered as this

M,W,Th,F 7:30 AM - 4:00 PM <br />Tu 7:30 AM - 6:00 PM <br />

Now i need to replace the <br /> as an empty space before it is rendered?? I already asked a similar question, but i underestimated the trickiness of this.. I did this

$('.WorkingHours').text().replace(/<br \/>/g, " ");

didn't work..can someone help me out of this?

Shouldn't this work?

$('.WorkingHours').text().replace(/&lt;br \&gt;/g, " ");

You need to escape the < and > characters. try this `replace(/\
/g, " ");` — Austin Brunkhorst, Mar 14 '12 at 15:44
If you use `.text()` instead of `.html()` and the code that uses the regular expression [from my answer to your previous question](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9704362/remove-all-instances-of-a-character-in-a-string-with-something-else-javascript), it will just work fine: http://jsfiddle.net/K9jVH/. Instead of creating a new question, you should have clarified your original one. That said, you should fix the HTML generation in the first place. — Felix Kling, Mar 14 '12 at 15:46
@FelixKling Thank you so much, it worked great! and sorry about the repost! Will keep that in mind! — Anjana Sharma, Mar 14 '12 at 15:49

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:11

This will work:

$('.WorkingHours').text(function(i, text) {
    return text.replace(/<br\s*\/?>/g, " "); 
});

DEMO

In this case .html() would return the HTML entities (<) whereas .text() returns the decoded characters (i.e. <). Given that,

$('.WorkingHours').text().replace(/<br \/>/g, " ")

actually works as well but you still have to assign the result back to the element.

See also my previous answer.

Regarding replacing the last <br /> with a different character: It might be possible with regular expressions, but in that case, I would just parse the text as HTML and perform the same operation as I showed in my previous answer:

var $content = $('<div />').html($('.WorkingHours').text());
$content 
 .find('br').last().replaceWith('.')
 .end().replaceWith(' ');

$('.WorkingHours').html($content.html());

DEMO

sir,is there a way to replace the last
by '.'?? like using lastindexOF — Anjana Sharma, Mar 14 '12 at 15:52

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 14 '12 at 15:46

0

you have to escape the HTML characters to complete the pattern...

replace(/\<br \/\>/g, " ");

answered Mar 14 '12 at 15:46

Eric Hodonsky

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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 14 '12 at 15:50

0

If you have html entities in markup try replacing those instead

   replace('&lt;br \/&gt;', ' ')

Looks like you were missing a "/"

answered Mar 14 '12 at 15:50

charlietfl

170,828
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very tricky html characters as text

3 Answers3