Question

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Replace all < and > that are NOT part of an HTML tag

1. Using Python
2. I know how much everyone here hates REGEX questions surrounding HTML tags, but I am just doing this as a exercise to help my learn REGEX.

Replace (1 can be any character):

<b>< </b>
<b> < </b>
<b> <</b>
<b><</b>
<b><111</b>
<b>11<11</b>
<b>111<</b>
<b>11<11</b>

<b>
<<<
</b>

With:

<b>& </b>
<b> & </b>
<b> &</b>
<b>&</b>
<b>&111</b>
<b>11&11</b>
<b>111&</b>
<b>11&11</b>

<b>
&
</b>

I am searched in the interwebs and tried many of my own solutions. Please, is this possible? And if so, how?

My best guess was something like:

re.sub(r'(?<=>)(.*?)<(.*?)(?=</)', r'\1&lt;\2', string)

But that falls apart with re.DOTALL and ‘<<<‘+ etc.

Answer 1

You could use something like this:

re.sub(r'(?:<(?!/?b>))+', '&', string)

And if you’d want it to work with (some) other tags, you could use something like this:

re.sub(r'(?:<(?!/?\w+[^<>]*>))+', '&', string)