patterns

[litchu]

hello,

im trying to create a pattern that will split my text on spaces, but not when there is <img infront.

this is becaus i want to split my text on spaces and place them between <span></span>, but when i add <img src=""> it will go like <span><img</span><span>src=""></span>.. wont work

my experience with regular expressions is not so great, but im trying my best

[daihuws]

On parsing HTML with regular expressions, I would like to refer you to what I think must be the best answer ever given to a question on Stack Overflow:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1...732454#1732454
For a discussion of that post, and why it's a bad idea, see: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/200...hulhu-way.html

More constructively, as to how to solve this problem - do you need to do it live - i.e. via some sort of Ajax method - or can you possibly do it via a server-side script? I don't know of any HTML parsers written in JavaScript. There's one for Python that I've been using called Beautiful Soup which works well, but server-side Python isn't something that most web hosting packages support...

[litchu]

im not trying to parse, im trying to split and then with a forloop im adding the span classes.. does that make any difference?

[Logic Ali]

Presumably you want to split on any spaces that aren't within <tags>. If so try splitting on this pattern:

/\x20+(?![^<]*>)/

[litchu]

/\x20+(?![^<]*>)/ works thank you