Question

Recently I started to refactor a web application project. A lot of HTML tags written in the JSP doesn’t respect the standard defined by W3C.
I want to close all tag not closed.

<img style="border:0px;"
     src="target/img/expande.gif"
     alt="Expand target information" > // --> this tag is not closed!

So, with this expr I can search all not closed tag:
(?s)<img("[^"]*"|'[^']*'|[^'">/])*>
What should I do for replace the piece of code with /> ?

Answer 1

I assume that you’re using the Eclipse-builtin regex based search&replace on files matching *.jsp.

You need to group the parts of interest with a set of parentheses.

(?s)(<img("[^"]*"|'[^']*'|[^'">/])*)(>)

In replacement, each group can be identified by $n where n is the 1-based index of the group. So the $1 would return you the whole <img ... element without > (and $2 would return you the > itself; note that $0 returns the entire match).

So, once grouped the regex like that, this replacement should do:

$1/>

Note: preview the replacement carefully. Regex and HTML don’t necessarily go well together.