Regex for HTML tags

Question

I would like to modify (enclose) the inner text of a td tag, such that:
<td align="center">abc123</td> to become <td align="center">="abc123"</td>
htmltext = htmtext.replaceAll("(<td\\b[^>]*>)(.*?)(</td>)", "$1=\"$2\"$3");That works, but I want to try the lookaround technique, as follows:
htmltext = htmtext.replaceAll("(?=<td\\b[^>]*>)(.*?)(?<=</td>)", "=\"$1\"");but it yields ="<td align="center">abc123</td>"
What would be the correct regex? Thanks.

Answer 1

nguyenq87 wrote:
Would you care to explain why the reluctant quantifier ? is omitted from (.*)?Note that "(.*?)" and "(.*)?" are tow different things! The first is a reluctant DOT-STAR. The latter means: "optionally match zero or more characters".
nguyenq87 wrote:
I thought without it, it would consume the closing tag also.It does, but then back tracks in favour of a match. It's safer to make the DOT-STAR reluctant instead of greedy. The greedy variant will match:
"<td>foo</td> bbb <td>bar</td>" from a string like:
"aaa <td>foo</td> bbb <td>bar</td> ccc" I assume you know it's rather tricky to parse HTML using regex... Just to name two issues: what about commented HTML? And what about td's that span more than one line?