[immsav]

I've got BBEdit open. I've got a webpage full of entries like this:

<strong>Anti-Slavery International</strong> - <a href="http://www.antislavery.org">http://www.antislavery.org</a>
– ASI is the oldest human rights organization in world and the sister
organization to Free the Slaves, based in London, England.

I want to change this to:

<dt><a href="http://www.antislavery.org">Anti-Slavery International</a></dt><dd>ASI is the oldest human rights organization in world and the sister organization to Free the Slaves, based in London, England.</dd>

This would take hours to do by hand, but I know there's a quick solution using BBEdit's grep search and replace feature. After trying out different patterns for half an hour or so, I haven't been having much luck.

Can anyone here help me?

Thanks,

JP

[Paul McCann]

Try something like:

Find:

<strong>(.*)</strong>.*(<a href.*?>).*</a>([^<]*)

Replace with:

<dt>\2\1</a></dt>\r<dd>\3</dd>\r

(obviously with "Use grep" ticked!). It's far from perfect, but it might get the job done. Parsing html is usually in imperfect sort of operation.

Best of luck,
Paul

[immsav]

Thanks, Paul. Your solution worked out well, although I had to escape the brackets and slashes with backslashes--only those outside of the parentheses, though. Curious.

You definitely saved me a few hours of tedious editing. Thanks again.

-JP

[Paul McCann]

No problem whatsoever! Glad to hear that you got there in the end.

I'm still a bit confused as to the escaping business however; works fine in BBEdit 6.5.3 as printed in my post above (for what it's worth). I guess they've just changed the rules for what counts as a metacharacter through the different versions.

Best wishes,
Paul

[absmiths]

Originally posted by immsav:
I've got BBEdit open. I've got a webpage full of entries like this:

<dt><a href="http://www.antislavery.org">Anti-Slavery International</a></dt><dd>ASI is the oldest human rights organization in world and the sister organization to Free the Slaves, based in London, England.</dd>

While you are at it, you should correct a grammatical mistake you made in both versions - "ASI is the oldest human rights organization in the world and ..."