Question

I am trying to write regex for replacing string.

There are string examples:

I am student.

I <a href="am.html">am</a> student.

I want to write regex which will replace “am” with <a> html tag, and get second string as result of replacing the first string.

Problem is nesting in quotes and text inside tag.

For example if I try to replace string “am” in this example:

I <a href="am.html">am</a> am student.

Result should be:

I <a href="am.html">am</a> <a href="am.html">am</a> student.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

If it’s a simple case like this you could use simple lookarounds to make sure that the thing you are matching is not surrounded by > and < but that it has word boundaries (\b) around it:

(?<!>)\bam\b(?!<)