Another problem with this pattern is that it will replace other spaces on a 
line that contains an anchor tag and other tags. You can add a quote to the 
first assertion but it's still going to have some spaces it encodes that it 
doesn't need to.

[fletcher]

> On Jun 26, 2024, at 9:58 AM, [email protected] wrote:
> 
> There's probably a more clever way to do this but this pattern works with 
> multiple passes. Each Replace All will replace one space per link. Eventually 
> it should have a pass where it doesn't replace anything.
> 
> Find: (?<=>)(.*?) (.*?)(?=</a>)
> Replace: \1\&nbsp;\2
> 
> It uses a look behind and a look ahead assertion to find the text between > 
> and </a> and then replaces the first space inside.
> 
> [fletcher]
> 
>> On Jun 26, 2024, at 9:24 AM, [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi all,
>> 
>> Longtime fan, first time caller. BBEdit's the best.
>> 
>> I know my way around BBEdit grep searches pretty well, and yet I'm finding 
>> myself stumped on what seems like it should be a pretty simple thing.
>> 
>> I've got a bunch of lines that contain hyperlinks to song titles. In 
>> simplified form, they look like this:
>> 
>> <a href='index.html#All Day Long'>All Day Long</a>
>> <a href='index.html#Chosen Time'>Chosen Time</a>
>> <a href='index.html#Sooner Than You Think'>Sooner Than You Think</a>
>> 
>> I chose these specific examples because they have a variable number of 
>> spaces within the song names. What I want to do is replace the spaces in the 
>> displayed text (that is, between the ">" and the "<") with "&nbsp;" but  I 
>> want to not do the same to the spaces within the href= portion of the <a tag.
>> 
>> I can search with something like:
>> >.*?</a>
>> and that will match only the portion I want to change.
>> 
>> Or if it helped, I could chunk the whole line into subpatterns, like:
>> ^(<a.*?)(#.*?>)(.*?)(</a>)
>> which would then put what I want to change in \3.
>> 
>> But in either case, what would I put in the Replace field that would allow 
>> me to replace only the spaces with something else ("&nbsp;" in this case)? 
>> Or, is there some strategy for breaking it up into multiple finds that would 
>> get the job done? I've really racked my brain for a while on this and I feel 
>> like I must be staring at it but not seeing it.
>> 
>> Thanks for any ideas!
>> 
>> Ivan.
>> 
>> 
>> 
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