RegEx: can't figure this out!

[Laurens]

Hello everyone, I have been trying for days to get this right but I can't seem
to grasp it: I'm trying (ofcourse) to match a substring inside a string, but
want to skip other occurrences of the same substring. I'll give an example to
stay comprehensible: My string: Some text<font color='red'>I'm building a new
front here where the frontier used to be</font> some more text. I'm trying to
match 'ont', but only the occurrences outside the tags, ie, it has to skip the
'ont' in '<font color=...>' and '</font>', but it has to come up with the 'ont'
in 'front' and 'frontier'. I found RegEx that strip the tags, but I want to
keep them, just not show up in the results. I want to skip the tags, not remove
them. I would be very grateful to those who can help help me, thanks in
advance. Laurens Bloem

[Laurens]

Anyone? Pretty please?

[Adam Cameron]

> Some text<font color='red'>I'm building a new

> front here where the frontier used to be</font> some more text.

This is tricky, because - as near as I can tell - you can't tell a regex to
NOT match a specific character sequence. You can tell it to match a
something that isn't a character (or a set of characters), but not a set
sequence.

You could easily enough get it to match [^f]ont, but that would also skip
the word "font" (and anything else with that sequence in it) within the
text, too.

I'd probably swap out <[/]?font matches for something else, then deal with
your "ont" issue, then swap the font tags back in again. Pity to do it in
three steps, but I can't think of another way of doing it.

--

Adam

[Laurens]

Hi Adam, thanks a lot for your reply.I thought of that, but then I'm left with
the problem that it still finds <TD class='content'> for example, and I need to
skeep all tags... Do you think I can find every ont in tags, so between < and

>. If I can REreplace those by some strange string, than your solution will

work, using one step to change every 'ont' that's inbetween < and > to
something like '___temporarily_changed___', then a second step that simply
replaces every ont still in the string, then a third to change back all the
'___temporarily_changed___' to 'ont'. Thanks for your help, I'll try to find
how to find 'ont's within tags. If that's easy to you, please answer back.
Kind regards, Laurens

[Adam Cameron]

>Do you think I can find every ont in tags, so between < and

>>. If I can REreplace those by some strange string, than your solution will

> work, using one step to change every 'ont' that's inbetween < and > to
> something like '___temporarily_changed___', then a second step that simply

(<[^>]*)(ont)([^>]*>)

Seems to work. Only tested it for about 30sec, though.

All this begs the question... WHY are you wanting to change all instances
of ONT to something else? ;-)

--

Adam

[Laurens]

Hi Adam, I took 'ont' as an example to stay comprehensible. What I'm doing is
writing a HighLight UDF that looks for a search phrase (entered by the user)
and highlights it in the found text. To highlight the occurrences of the search
phrase in the found text, I replace the match with <span class='highlight'>the
match</span>. But that is highly undesirable if the text contains tags, because
they suddenly show up where they shouldn't looking highlighted. You could get
something like <f<span class='highlight'>ont</span> color='red'>This is the
fr<span class='highlight'>ont</span></f<span class='highlight'>ont</span> But
if I explained that, and then asked my question, I would have lost everybody
long before they got to the question ;-) Have a good weekend!! Laurens