Question

I have this string with HTML inside: <span title="whatever">something I want to preserve</span>...

I’m using a regex to replace <span title="whatever"> with ( and then the following </span> replace with )

Pattern regex = Pattern.compile("<span\\s+[^>]*title=(['\"])(.*?)\\1[^>]*>");
Matcher matcher = regex.matcher(strLine);
if (matcher.find()) {
    strLine = matcher.replaceAll("(");
    strLine = strLine.replace("</span>", ")");
}

I works but it replaces all </span> tags; I only want to replace the one that matches the opening tag I just matched.

Answer 1

Why not do it in one replaceAll(...) call:

String s = "noise <span title=\"whatever\">something I want to preserve</span>...";
s = s.replaceAll("<span\\s+[^>]*title=(['\"])(.*?)\\1[^>]*>(.*?)</span>", "($3)");
System.out.println(s);

which will print:

noise (something I want to preserve)...

EDIT

Note Alan’s comment under my answer: this assumes you don’t have nested <span>‘s in your input.