Question

I’m upgrading some code written in visual basic. The regex doesn’t work as I’d expected.

Basically the regex is applied in a loop, it replaces keywords with anchor links. So it builds up a string which could have lots of phrases / words replaced with links to those phrases / words.

The problem is that if I have two phrases wiki and wikipedia. It will do wikipedia first as I’ve ordered the query to produce the list of phrases by length. However, the regex will replace wikiepedia then wiki reglardless of the whether wikipedia is converted to a link.

So I get a link within a link.

Heres the code.

do 
oRegExp.Pattern = "(" & title & ")(?![^<]*>|[^<]*</a>)"
title = " <a href=""view.asp?id=" guid & """>" & "$&" & "</a> "
content = oRegExp.Replace(content, title)
loop

Answer 1

Adding part of my comment as answer as it seems to have solved it for you.

You can try adding surrounding \b around your title, like "(\b" & title & "\b).

When doing this you do not need to do the replacement in any specific order, as long as you are replacing singe words.