replace semicolon (;) but not html characters (  etc.)

Question

I'm looking for regexp for my issue. I have a text (specification of a product), for example:

length: 20cm; height: 10cm; «Night» mode: yes; manufacturer : Sony© manual : yes

The final result should look like this

<tr><td>length</td><td>20cm</td></tr>
...
<tr><td>manufacturer</td><td>Sony&copy;</td></tr>

So I should replace ":" + whitespace characters(\\s*) for "</td><td>" and ";" + whitespace characters(\\s*) ";" + whitespace characters(\\s*) for "</td></tr><tr><td>" , but not in the case where there are latin symbols [az]+ and & sign before the ; . The point is in html chars like &_nbsp; &_laquo; &_copy etc. that contains ";"

In other words :\\s* but not &[az]+[;] .

How can I do this?

My regexp in smarty looks like this: " |regex_replace:"/[:]\\s*/":""|regex_replace:"/[;]\\s*/":"" " so the only thing is to remove html chars... I tried some combinations with (?!...) but no success I'm looking for something like this RegExp for matching three letters, but not text "BUY"

Answer 1

Use a negative look-behind to find semicolons not part of an encoded character:

(?<!&[a-z]{2})(?<!&[a-z]{3})(?<!&[a-z]{4})(?<!&[a-z]{5});\s*

This regex matches only naked semi colons. Unfortunately, the multiple look-behinds are required so cover all possibilities due to negative look behinds demanding a fixed length expression.

See a live demo of this regex.

Answer 2

If you must use the regular expression , you can step like this:

1. remove all character, except \\w : ; & \\w : ; &
2. replace all © to @@@copy###
3. you can replace the : ; with <td> now
4. replace all @@@copy### to ©
5. remove all  

Answer 3

How about:

$str = 'length: 20cm; height: 10cm; «Night» mode: yes; manufacturer : Sony© manual : yes';
$str = preg_replace('#(?!&[a-z]+); #', '</td></tr><tr><td>', $str);
$str = preg_replace('#: #', '</td><td>', $str);