Question

Before somebody points me to that question, I know that one can’t parse html with regex 🙂 And this is not what I am trying to do.

What I need is:

Input: a string containing html.
Output: replace all opening tags

***<tag>

So if I get

<a><b><c></a></b></c>, I want

***<a>***<b>***<c></a></b></c>

as output.

I’ve tried something like:

(<[~/].+>)

and replace it with

***$1

But doesn’t really seem to work the way I want it to. Any pointers?

Clarification: it’s guaranteed that there are no self closing tags nor comments in the input.

Answer 1

You just have two problems: ^ is the character to exclude items from a character class, not ~; and the .+ is greedy, so will match as many characters as possible before the final >. Change it to:

(<[^/].+?>)

You can also probably drop the parentheses and replace with $0 or $&, depending on the language.