Question

I need a AS3 regular expression that allows me to find/replace in strings like these:

var str1:String = "<value1 att="1"> some text</value1>";
var str2:String = "<value1 att="1" var="a">  some text and more</value1>";
var str3:String = "<value1 att="ok" var="b" def="12">     some text</value1>";

to this:

str1 = "<value1 att="1">*some text</value1>";
str2 = "<value1 att="1" var="a">**some text and more</value1>";
str3 = "<value1 att="ok" var="b" def="12">*****some text</value1>";

I want to be able to replace the spaces at the beginning (inside the > <) for other character. It shouldn’t affect the number of character at the right of the spaces or the attributes in the value1 definition.

Answer 1

Assuming that there are no “* ” sequences in the text blocks, this should work:

var s:String = "<value1 att='ok' var='b' def='12'>     some text</value1>";

//find all spaces after a tag closing bracket and replace with a *
s = s.replace(/>\s/g, ">*");

//find all spaces after a * and replace it with a *
//keep doing this until no more can be found
while (s.match(/>\*+\s/g).length) {
    s = s.replace(/\*\s/g, "**");
}

I can’t think of a way to do it in one replace though.