Question

I’m trying to get select just the string “Target” case-sensitive without grabbing any extra space before or after in HTML code, and not getting tags or tag attributes.
I have this regex:

/(?![^<>]*>) *(Target) *([^ \d])/g

This does grab multiple occurences of :Target, but it also grabs extra spaces before and after, the first character that follows it or extra whitespace after it.
In<div id="Target">text Target othertext</div> it grabs Target o
How do I perfect this?

Answer 1

Depending on what you’re using to handle the RegEx, it could be because you’re using multiple capture groups. I’d change the other capture groups to non-capturing by prefixing them with ?::

/(?:?![^<>]*>) *(Target) *(?:[^ \d])/g

EDIT:

With the additional information from the comments, shouldn’t this work?

var str="<div id=\"Target\">text Target othertext</div>";
str = str.replace(/Target/g,"New!");

EDIT #2:

Here’s a pass that starts with your original regex and uses some information from this StackOverflow post:

var str="<div id=\"Target\">text Target othertext</div><Target test=\"nothing\">Target this is Targeted.</Target>";
alert(str.replace(/(?![^<>]*>)( *)Target( *[^ \d])/g,function(str,group1,group2){return group1 + "NEW!" + group2;}));

I’ve tested it myself and it seems to do what you need…or at least get you further along.