Question

I want to replace a regex with ‘*’, but only if the regex is out side of <>. The whole point is to not interfere with the html tags.

I use this to replace:

re.sub(r'SOMEREGEX(?=[^>]*(<|$))', '*', line)

However I ran into his problem: if my regex is:

f.*k

Then this:

fzzzzzzzzz<HTMLTAG>zzzzzzzk

Would become an ‘*’, which I don’t want. How do I overcome this problem?

Constraints:

-All brackets are matched

-No nested brackets

-SOMEREGEX is provided by the user. I prefer not changing that.

Answer 1

You could try replacing the . character – “any character at all” – with the character class [^<>], which matches any character except the angle brackets, <>. This would give the regex f[^<>]*k. This would match facebook but not face<b>book.

There are still things that can go wrong with this, though. Have you considered using a proper HTML parser instead of regular expressions? BeautifulSoup is easy, tasty and fun.