Question

I want to get rid of ‘:’ within the XML elements tags only, using regex in C#.

I am aware that parsing the document is the way to go instead of regex..but it is a legacy project and it uses Regex to replace the XML Document content. Not the ideal method to process XML Document, but nothing I can do about.

I am not good with regular expressions and just can’t figure out a way to replace ‘:’ only from the Element Tags and not values…

For example
<tag:name> the value with the tag http://www.example.com </tag:name>

I want to replace : with _ only within the element name and not value. So the outcome should be :

<tag_name> the value with the tag http://www.example.com </tag_name>

Any idea?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Does this work for you?

Regex tagRegex = new Regex("<[^>]+>");
yourXML = tagRegex.Replace(yourXML, delegate(Match thisMatch)
{
   return thisMatch.Value.Replace(":", "_");
});