Forums Scripts & Popups regexp help to a newbie

Hi,

Sorry if I'm asking a dumb question, I just dont know too much about regexp but I seemed to compile a little bit.

I want to change all backslashes \ to forward slashes /, that I have in many html files, however I only want to do it for slashes within the <a> tag. I have 2 started solutions that I cant seem to get over a hump with.

1.
<a[^>]*>
This will highlight all my link tags. I would like to use <a[\\]*> instead but then there is no padding. THe only way that will work is for one slash and if the html link looks like <a\>, and that will never occur.
I need this to work on html tags like the following example:
<a href = "blah\blah\blah..." >
and avoid all other slashes outside this tag.

2.
Solution to was provided by a friend who doesnt have much knowledge, but more than me and he wanted to use a lookback but again ran into trouble with a fixed length variable.
(?<=<a)\\(?=>)
I dont understand this method too much.

Thanks for you time.

This one appears to work.

alias FixSlash1 {

• var %a = $1
  while $regsub(%a, /(\G(?(?<=^).*?<a)[^>]*?)\\/gi, \1/, %a) { }
  return %a

}

//echo -a $FixSlash1(<a href = "blah\blah\blah...">)
gives
<a href = "blah/blah/blah...">

Thanks for your response, what language was that script written for?
Will that work in PHP?
THanks

It was written for mIRC, my php is rusty but I think this should work.

Whatever works with mIRC's $regsub should work with PHP's preg_* functions, but there's a better way to do that in PHP. Try this code:

You guys rock,

Im not to sure I understnad all the syntax in the regexps you guys provided but I will give them a try. Will they work for 0..n amount of backslashes?

THanks very much, you guys rock!

Yes, there should be no limitations with the PHP version.

If you forget my first reply with the complex mIRC alias and focus only on the PHP version, you can see that it takes every occurrence of the <A> tag and passes it through str_replace(), which, in turn, ensures that all backslashes (chr 92) within the current tag are replaced with forward-slashes (chr 43).

You can find more examples that use preg_replace() in the manual.

Hi Online, I tried your solution and it worked for the test string however when I passed your FixSlash function an html string, not all the link backslashes were changed. The file I tested was:
http://www.ctremblay.com/EQT_front_page.htm
I have about 2000 like this.

Also, I tried using my reg exp instead:
'<a[^>]*>'
but got a warning error, unkown modifier ']'

not sure why that didnt work. Anyways, any suggestions?

Thanks so much!!!

Oh yea, I havent tried any other solutions yet, I have a nice class setup in PHP that sorts through all files/folders and picks out a file type specified. SO i just need to do the pregexp. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.!!!

It looks as if I need to know the syntax to replace a back slash with a foward slash. I have:
preg_replace('/<a[^>]*>/', '/',$str);

THis is replaceing all the hyperlinks with a slash, I dont know much about regexp, but I need to replace it with the hyperlink just modifying \ with /.
THanks

Sorry for the late reply. Try to change

$re = '/<a [^>]+>/ei';

to...

$re = '/<a\s+[^>]+>/ei';

The difference between the two is that the former requires that a single space follow the "<A", while the latter accepts any whitespace character that follows (space, tab, newline etc). This makes the pattern compatible with tags that occupy multiple lines like this...