Replace *
with

Question

I have the following text:

*<BR> Bullet1 *<BR>Bullet 2 *<BR>Bullet 3 *<BR>Bullet 4

I want to replace every *<BR> with <li> but also place a </li> at the end of the text (When it reaches a new *<BR> or can't find any)

The trick thing is that I also need a <ul> around all the li's to make it valid html.

I thought about using regular expressions but to honest I can't quite grasp the concept of it.

My idea was to split the text with *, then see if the first word is
, if it is then I replace it with
One thing to note is that I believe `` can be implied rather than explicit so you don't necessarily need to place them (because opening another `

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:43

3

Matching HTML with regular expressions is a bad idea. Read this thread for why Using regular expressions to parse HTML: why not?. If you are sure there will be no other html markup in it, a simple split would work

var str = "*<BR> Bullet1 *<BR>Bullet 2 *<BR>Bullet 3 *<BR>Bullet 4";
var parts = str.split("*<BR>");
parts.shift();
var html = "<li>" + parts.join("</li><li>") + "</li>";
console.log(html);

edited May 23 '17 at 11:43

Community

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answered Jan 20 '14 at 15:35

epascarello

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More on parsing HTML with regex.... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags – StackExchange What The Heck Jan 20 '14 at 15:36
Sorry I know this is not a pretty solution but the text is from an external datasource so I have to do it this way :( I will mark your answer as accepted. – Dumpen Jan 20 '14 at 15:39
There are other ways of doing it. Basic walking of the DOM and checking nodes. – epascarello Jan 20 '14 at 15:40

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 20 '14 at 15:33

Quick but dirty:

var text = '*<BR> Bullet1 *<BR>Bullet 2 *<BR>Bullet 3 *<BR>Bullet 4';
var result = '<ul>' + text.replace(/\*<BR>/g, '</li><li>').substring(5) + '</li></ul>';
// result = "<ul><li> Bullet1 </li><li>Bullet 2 </li><li>Bullet 3 </li><li>Bullet 4</li></ul>"

More info about regular expression replace in javascript: http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_replace.asp & http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_obj_regexp.asp

Dirty because of W3Schools ? :) – Ali Gajani Jan 20 '14 at 15:33 — Ali Gajani, Jan 20 '14 at 15:33

Bryan Elliott · Answer 3 · 2014-01-20T15:50:53.313

0

I don't think regex is the best way to do this, but here's how it could be done with regex:

var str = "*<BR> Bullet1 *<BR>Bullet 2 *<BR>Bullet 3 *<BR>Bullet 4";

var res = "<ul>" + str.replace(/\*<BR>[\s]?([^\*]+)/g, "<li>$1</l1>") + "</ul>";

console.log(res);

Output:

<ul><li>Bullet1 </li><li>Bullet 2 </li><li>Bullet 3 </li><li>Bullet 4</li></ul>

Working Example:

http://jsfiddle.net/BkbrF/4/

edited Jan 20 '14 at 15:50

answered Jan 20 '14 at 15:43

Bryan Elliott

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Replace * with

3 Answers3

Replace *
with