On Wednesday, 15 August 2012 14:30:27 UTC-3, Ben Fritz wrote:
> On Wednesday, August 15, 2012 10:39:21 AM UTC-5, jcordes wrote:
>
> > I am working on an HTML file generated by WordPerfect's Publish to HTML,
> > trying to get clean html but maintaining the format fairly closely. One
> > thing I'd like to do is delete empty tag pairs, such as this:
>
> > <SPAN STYLE="text-decoration: underline"></SPAN>
>
> >
>
> > I'm sure this must be a trivial regex problem for some but I'm apparently
> > missing some key idea. I'm working under Linux, with
>
> > VIM - Vi IMproved 7.1 (2007 May 12, compiled Oct 17 2008 18:11:28)
>
> > (sorry, not easy to upgrade)
>
> > I have tried search patterns along the following lines
>
> > /<SPAN .\{-}><\/SPAN>
>
>
>
> The problem is that even though you're using non-greedy, "non-greedy" just
> means "as few as possible to make it match". E.g. this will match:
>
>
>
> <SPAN>abcdef</SPAN><SPAN></SPAN>
>
>
>
> because the .\{-} matches any character at all, and therefore matches very
> happily on the ">abcdef</SPAN><SPAN" text.
>
>
>
> Try this instead, explicitly asking for any character which is NOT a '>':
>
>
>
> <SPAN[^>]*><\/SPAN>
>
>
>
> Or this variant, also allowing line breaks:
>
>
>
> <SPAN\_[^>]*><\/SPAN>
Ben,
Thank you very much. That does indeed appear to solve the problem -- your
speedy response much appreciated.
Anyone else reading can probably tell from the followup I made to my own post
shows that I have confused myself quite thoroughly on this point!
John
--
You received this message from the "vim_use" maillist.
Do not top-post! Type your reply below the text you are replying to.
For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php
