如果href值为正则表达式，则将锚标记值替换为锚标题

Question

I am trying to replace the anchor tag value with anchor's title value if any anchor tag's href attribute is blank.

Like

<a xlink:href="">Lorem Ipsum</a>  is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry<a xlink:href ="http://google.com">Google</a>. 

if I try with below regex:

<a [^>]+>(.*?)<\/a>

DEMO http://regexr.com/3h6on

then output I am getting below

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry Google. 

it replaced both anchor tag with Anchor Text value, and I need to replace those anchor tag where the href attribute value is empty.

I need an output like below

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry<a xlink:href ="http://google.com">Google</a> 

Answer 1

My approach looks rather messy but for the test link you provided it seems to work just like you want it to:

<a [^>]+?(?=href=(?:"|')(?:"|'))[^>]*?>(.*?)<\/a>

Try it with this link.

---

What I've added to the regex is the following part

[^>]+?(?=href=(?:"|')(?:"|'))[^>]*?

The . wildcards at the beginning and end of the part I've added are just there to match with any additional attributes or whitespaces between the < >.

The regex inside the parenthesis is called a positive lookahead . This means that it will match whatever is inside the parenthesis but will not include it into the results.

The positive lookahead matches an href followed by an empty string.

Note that my regex still matches if the quotation marks after the href= expression do not match

I hope this answered your question.

Answer 2

Please try this: <a[^<]+href=(['"]{2})\\1?[^>]*?>([^<>]*)<\\/a>

Try it here .