Question

I have a bunch of html with lines like this:

<a href="#" rel="this is a test">

I need to replace the spaces in the rel-attribute with underscores, but I’m sort of a regex-noob!

I’m using Textmate.

Can anyone help me?

/Jakob

Answer 1

I don’t think you can do this properly. Though I wonder why you need to do it at one go?

I can think of a really poor way of doing it, but even if I don’t recommend it, here goes:

You could sort of do it with the regex below. However, you would have to increase the number of captures and outputs with a _ on the end to the potential number of spaces in the rel. I bet that is a requirement which disallows this solution.

Search:

{\<a *href\=\"[^\"]*" *rel\=\"}{([^ ]*|[^\"]*)}( |\")*{([^ ]*|[^\"]*)}( |\")*{([^ ]*|[^\"]*)}( |\")*{([^ ]*|[^\"]*)}( |\")*{([^ ]*|[^\"]*)}( |\")*{([^ ]*|[^\"]*)}( |\")*{([^ ]*|[^\"]*)}( |\")*{([^ ]*|[^\"]*)}( |\")*

Replace:

\1\2_\3_\4_\5_\6_\7_\8_

This way has two downsides, one is there might be limitations to the number of captures you can have in Textmate, two is you’ll end up with a large number of _’s on the end of each line.

With your current test, with the regex above, you would end up with:

<a href="#" rel="this_is_a_test">____

PS: This regex is of the format of the visual studio search/replace box. You’ll probably need to change some characters to make it fit textpad.

 {} => capturing group

  () => grouping

  [^A] => anything but A

  ( |\")* => space or "

  \1 => is the first capture