Question

this is my first post to stackoverflow, but I’ve used this amazing site before.

Anyway, I suck at regular expressions but I think I need them for what I need to do.

Short Question:
I need to replace the space ' ' with ' ' between any occurrence of <code></code>.

More details:

The motivation behind this was because my code sections were creating extra lines every other line because of the extra spaces (I’m asuming). By replacing the spaces with  , I was able to format the code correctly.

However, this introduced a LOT of extra characters into my HTML. Not only is it inefficient, it also makes word-wrap: break-word; break the words in half rather than move the entire word down.

Answer 1

disclaimer: in no way do i think this is the solution you will neccessarily arrive at, some other answers already here address what you *should/could otherwise do to accomplish your task.

but let’s just assume you DID want to do it with regex. Since I think we can make the assumption that with <code>stuff</code>, stuff won’t contain nested code tags, you can accomplish your short question with it, but you still need a couple steps:

//sorry for the c#, the but intent should translate clearly.
string input = @"<div>whatever</div> id='tricky'><code>adsfasd   fasdfasdfvar data = "" 8 5.00000000 8.0 9.000000"";var re = /(\.0{0,2})(0*)/g; var match = re.exec(data);alert(data.replace(re, RegExp.1));</code><p>more stuff with stuff.</p>";
var code = Regex.Match(input, "<code>(.*?)</code>").Value;
var munged = Regex.Replace(code, @"\s", "&nbsp;");
var result = Regex.Replace(input, "<code>(.*?)</code>", munged);