Question

I’m trying to select some text using regular expressions leaving all img tags intact.

I’ve found the following code that selects all img tags:

/<img[^>]+>/g

but actually having a text like:

This is an untagged text.
<p>this is my paragraph text</p>
<img src="http://example.com/image.png" alt=""/>
<a href="http://example.com/">this is a link</a>

using the code above will select the img tag only

/<img[^>]+>/g #--> using this code will result in:
<img src="http://example.com/image.png" alt=""/>

but I would like to use some regex that select everything but the image like:

/magical regex/g # --> results in:
This is an untagged text.
<p>this is my paragraph text</p>
<a href="http://example.com/">this is a link</a>

I’ve also found this code:

/<(?!img)[^>]+>/g

which selects all tags except the img one. but in some cases I will have untagged text or text between tags so this won’t work for my case. 🙁

is there any way to do it?
Sorry but I’m really new to regular expressions so I’m really struggling for few days trying to make it work but I can’t.

Thanks in advance

---

UPDATE:

Ok so for the ones thinking I would like to parse it, sorry I don’t want it, I just want to select text.

Another thing, I’m not using any language in specific, I’m using Yahoo Pipes which only provide regex and some string tools to accomplish the job. but it doesn’t evolves any programming code.

for better understanding here is the way regex module works in yahoo pipes:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/docs?doc=operators#Regex

---

UPDATE 2

Fortuntately I’m being able to strip the text near the img tag but on a step-by-step basis as @Blixt recommended, like:

<(?!img)[^>]+> , replace with "" #-> strips out every tag that is not img
(?s)^[^<]*(.*), replace with $1  #-> removes all the text before the img tag
(?s)^([^>]+>).*, replace with $1 #-> removed all the text after the img tag

the problem with this is that it will only catch the first img tag and then I would have to do it manually and catch the others hard-coding it, so I still not sure if this is the best solution.

Answer 1

The regexp you have to find the image tags can be used with a replace to get what you want.

Assuming you are using PHP:

$htmlWithoutIMG = preg_replace('/<img[^>]+>/g', '', $html);

If you are using Javascript:

var htmlWithoutIMG = html.replace(/<img[^>]+>/g, '');

This takes your text, finds the <img> tags and replaces them with nothing, ie. it deletes them from the text, leaving what you want. Can not recall if the <,> need escaping.