Question

I have a function in my script that’s supposed to take in a string of HTML and return the same string with the exception that all the elements shall have been changed to one that is 2 levels higher (ie. h1->h3, h2->h4 etc.). This of cause needs to work independed of casing, and it must not remove attributes, however, I’m not about to use a full html-parser for it either, as it’s a fairly simple task, so I figured I’d go about this with regexes. The problem is (me beeing fairly new to vbscript and all) that I don’t know how to achieve the desired effect.

What I have currently is this:

Function fiksoverskrifter(html)
   Dim regex, matches, match
   Set regex = New RegExp
   regex.Pattern = "<(/?)h([0-9])(.*?)>"
   regex.IgnoreCase = True
   regex.Multiline = False

   fiksoverskrifter = html

   Set matches = regex.Execute(html)
   For Each match in matches

   Next

   Set regex = Nothing
   Set matches = Nothing
   Set match = Nothing
End Function

What I want inside the For Each-loop is simply to swap the numbers, however, I’m not sure how to do that (I’m not even sure what properties the match-object exposes, and I’ve been unable to find it online).

How should I complete this function?

Answer 1

You’re asking for pain trying to do this with regex (not so much the replace but the fact that it’s an increment with a single regex pattern), if it’s only a case of replacing the Headers, i’d use replace():

For i = 4 To 1 Step -1
    strHtml = replace(strHtml, "<h" & cstr(i), "<h" & cstr(i + 2), 1, -1, vbTextCompare)
    strHtml = replace(strHtml , "</h" & cstr(i), "</h" & cstr(i + 2), 1, -1, vbTextCompare)
Next

(HTML Spec is only valid for H1–H6 – not sure if you want to ignore H5 & H6)

If you want to stick with the regex option, i’d suggest the use of regex.replace()

I know in JavaScript you can pass the matched pattern into a function and use that function as the replacement, exactly what you would need here – but i’ve never seen this done in VBSCRIPT, example:
Use RegExp to match a parenthetical number then increment it

Edit 1:

Found the reference to the matches collection & match object:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms974570.aspx#scripting05_topic3

So, you could read the match from the match.value property, but you’d still need to resort to a 2nd replace i think