Question

Is there an easy way in Emacs to search and replace text in an XML file, but for the s&r operation to only act on the document text, not the markup?

For example:

...
There is some text above here
[mark-starts-here]
<some_tag key="value">
  text
</some_tag>
[mark-ends-here]
There is some text below here
...

replace e with E to get:

...
There is some text above here
[mark-starts-here]
<some_tag key="value">
  tExt
</some_tag>
[mark-ends-here]
There is some text below here
...

Answer 1

I don’t know if xml mode has something like that built-in, but here’s a simple function which does it:

(defun my-replace-outside-of-tags (regexp replacement)
  (while (re-search-forward regexp nil t)
    (unless (save-match-data
              (looking-at "[^<>]*>"))
      (replace-match replacement))))