Question

I’ve got text where some lines are indented with 4 spaces. I’ve been trying to write a regex which would find every line beginning with 4 spaces and put a <span class="indented"> at the beginning and a </span> at the end. I’m no good at regex yet, though, so it came to nothing. Is there a way to do it?

(I’m working in PHP, in case there’s an option easier than regex).

Example:

Text text text
    Indented text text text
More text text text
A bit more text text.

to:

Text text text
<span class="indented">Indented text text text</span>
More text text text
A bit more text text.

Answer 1

The following will match lines starting with at least 4 spaces or a tab character:

$str = preg_replace("/^(?: {4,}|\t *)(.*)$/m", "<span class=\"indented\">$1</span>", $str);