Regex for Removing Comma between tag text C#

Question

I have the following string , i tried many many regex to remove comma between a tag text, but not found any regex for removing comma between a tag text. I want that , whenever text inside a tag has comma ,then will be replace by empty string.

<a href="#" class="main">Getty Center, Restaurant at the</a>

i have tried this regex but it is not working, here input is string that contains html.

input = Regex.Replace(input, @"<a(\s+[^>]*)?>[^\w\s]</a(\s+[^>]*)?>", "");

Please help me out. Thank You

do you have to use RegEx for this, and not just use input.Replace(",",""); — sa_ddam213, Nov 28 '12 at 05:46
i only want to replace the comma that is between tag. input string contains the html of page. I dont want to replace all comma in html, but only in the tag comma will be replace by empty sting that what i want. And want to do using regex — Waseem Fastian, Nov 28 '12 at 05:51
Did you try using an HTML parser rather than regular expressions? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags — Guillaume, Nov 28 '12 at 06:02
You can use htmlagility pack which can be found on codeplex.com. It is the best library for html tag removing and processing — Shyam sundar shah, Jun 08 '13 at 16:19

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 28 '12 at 06:18

I would suggest to use a HTML parser. There are plenty available which are open source and are free. One of the best I found is HTMLAgilityPack at HTMLAgilityPack

Some examples at Some Examples In nutshell, the following code snippet will give you all tag

HtmlDocument myDoc = new HtmlDocument();
myDoc.Load(path);

HtmlNodeCollection imgs = new HtmlNodeCollection(myDoc.DocumentNode.ParentNode);
imgs = myDoc.DocumentNode.SelectNodes("//img");

Hope that helps

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 28 '12 at 06:33

You can use the Regex to find and modify the content of the tag like so.

var input = "<a href=\"#\" class=\"main\">Getty Center, Restaurant at the</a>";
var regex = new Regex(@"<a[^>]*>(?<content>.*?)</a[^>]*>",
                      RegexOptions.Singleline);
var match = regex.Match(input);
while (match.Success) {
    var group = match.Groups["content"];
    input = input.Substring(0, group.Index)
            + group.Value.Replace(",", "")
            + input.Substring(group.Index + group.Length);
    match = regex.Match(input, group.Index);
};

The loop is in place to catch multiple tags in the same string. The Regex however is fairly naive. It will mess with tags nested inside the A tag, and will parse incorrectly if a > is in any of the attributes. (Though that would probably be bad HTML anyway.) A proper HTML parser is recommended for this reason.

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 28 '12 at 06:08

If you want to directly use the replace, you will have to match only the comma and not the text before or after the comma. You'd have to use look ahead and look behind to check if the comma is in the tag. Although this is doable, it is not advised to do this.

An alternative is to use matching groups to match the whole text in the tag and group the comma if it exists and replace the match.

<a[^>]+>[\w\s]*(,?)[\w\s]*<\/a>

The first capture group captures comma if present. You can test it here. [http://rubular.com/r/K2jjIaObty][1]

The best option would be to use a html parser to capture contents of the a tag, search for comma and replace.

Regex for Removing Comma between tag text C#

3 Answers3