Having a lot of difficulties using regex.

Heres what i am trying to do...

text<div> text </div><div> text </div><div> text </div>

to turn it in to

text<br> text<br>text<br>text

I've tryed doing...

newhtml = newhtml.replace(/\<div>/g,'<br>');
newhtml = newhtml.replace(/\</div>/g,' ');

but this gives the wrong output. Does jquery provide a better way of doing this?

Having a lot of difficulties using regex.

Heres what i am trying to do...

text<div> text </div><div> text </div><div> text </div>

to turn it in to

text<br> text<br>text<br>text

I've tryed doing...

newhtml = newhtml.replace(/\<div>/g,'<br>');
newhtml = newhtml.replace(/\</div>/g,' ');

but this gives the wrong output. Does jquery provide a better way of doing this?

• javascript
• jquery
• html
• regex

• 1 Do you want to replace just div tags, or any tag? – WhyNotHugo Commented Aug 23, 2012 at 11:44
• just <div> text </div> to <br>text – Lemex Commented Aug 23, 2012 at 11:46
• Who don't you just replace <div> with <br>, and remove all the </div> left over? – WhyNotHugo Commented Aug 23, 2012 at 11:47
• I meant, replace the string literals, instead of using regexes. :) – WhyNotHugo Commented Aug 23, 2012 at 11:51

7 Answers 7

That's because you're escaping the wrong thing, as only the backslash needs to be escaped.

newhtml = newhtml.replace(/<div>/g,'<br>');
newhtml = newhtml.replace(/<\/div>/g,' ');

Yes you are correct, jQuery does provide a better way of doing this.

An interesting read first.

Easy, elegant, solution to your specific problem.

$('div').replaceWith(function(){
  return "<br>"+$(this).html();
});​

jsFiddle

Don't use regexes if you don't need them; just replace string literals.

text.replace("<div>","<br>").replace("</div>","");

Note: This solution applies exactly to this scenario, I don't normally have anything against using regular expresions.

This must do the job:

text.replace(/(<\/?\w+?>)\s*?(<\/?\w+?>)|(<\/?\w+?>)/g,'<br>')

Though this will only work if there were no tags with some attributes like <div id="foo1"> You do not need to escape < as you did in your example, but instead you do need to escape /

A simple way to do this is the following:

$('.container').html(function(i, html) {
    return html.replace(/<(|\/)div>/g, function(match) {
        return match == '<div>' ? '<br>' : '';
    });
});

/<(|\/)div>/: Matches <div> or </div>.

demo

Note: .container is where your html is placed.

One Liner using JQuery

newhtml = $(newhtml ).text().split(' ').join('<br/>');

You can achieve this using a simple RegExp

output = inputText.replace(/<\w{0,}\W{0,}>|<\W{0,}\w{1,}>/ig, "With whatever you want it to be replaced with")

Or you can do this

String.prototype.replaceTags = function( replacementText )
{      
    var x = new RegExp( "(" + replacementText + ")+" , "ig");
    return this
           .replace( /<\w{0,}\W{0,}>|<\W{0,}\w{1,}>/ig, replacementText )
           .replace( x, replacementText )  
}

And then call it directly on the String as follows

"text<div> text </div><div> text </div><div> text </div>".replaceTags( "<br>" )

You'll get this -- "text<br> text <br> text <br> text <br>"

This will search for portions in the string which begin with the "<" contains some text in between "div/p/br" additionally if the tag is being ended by "/" and finally the ">" closing of the tag. The ignore case will help when you are not sure that the element is written in Upper or Lower case.