Question

I know some basic regexp, but here’s the thing. Every charachter will be enclosed in spans.
I want things that are surrounded by quotes to be replaced, so, something like "something" would actually be

<span class="charachter">"</span>
<span class="charachter">s</span>
<span class="charachter">o</span>
<span class="charachter">m</span>
<span class="charachter">e</span>
<span class="charachter">t</span>
<span class="charachter">h</span>
<span class="charachter">i</span>
<span class="charachter">n</span>
<span class="charachter">g</span>
<span class="charachter">"</span>

(The line breaks are there just for convinience. It’s just 1 long line in the real thing.)

How do I make that into:

<span class="charachter green">"</span>
<span class="charachter green">s</span>
<span class="charachter green">o</span>
<span class="charachter green">m</span>
<span class="charachter green">e</span>
<span class="charachter green">t</span>
<span class="charachter green">h</span>
<span class="charachter green">i</span>
<span class="charachter green">n</span>
<span class="charachter green">g</span>
<span class="charachter green">"</span>

? I’m using regexp because that “something” might be anything.

BTW: The use of jQuery in the code is allowed

There are more things that are .charachter class that I don’t want to add class “green” to, just the ones enclosed in quotes

Answer 1

This might work, depending on the complexity of your page:

var quotes = $("span.charachter:contains('\"')");
for (var i = 0; i < quotes.length - 1; i++) {
    quotes.eq(i).nextUntil(quotes.eq(++i)).andSelf().addClass("green");
}

Working demo: http://jsfiddle.net/3SRdD/2/

This assumes that:

• A span.charachter will only ever contain one single character.
• You will never have an unmatched quote.
• The following siblings of a span.charachter with a quote are always more span.charachter elements, at least until the closing quote.