HTML Cleanup (delete tags and contents)

Submitted by modestmoose on Wednesday, 7 April, 2010 - 20:07

I am working on a project at my law school. I receive news articles in .docx format and then convert them to .html. This requires a lot of cleanup of the extra tags Word puts into the text. I have a very simple macro that does a find and replace to delete common unneccessary tags. What I want to do is the entire header tag and its contents (and other tags such as table tags).

I have no programming background and can't figure it out. How would I have a macro search for (head) and (/head) and then delete the tags and everything in between?

Thank you ahead of time for any insights you can give me,

Brian

Regular Expressions

by Robert Schwenn on Thu, 08/04/2010 - 19:42

You should record a macro after You've manually tested it successful with settings like these:
- Regular Expressions = ON
- search for "(head)(.*\n)*.*(/head)"
- replace with ""

Of course You have to replace the brackets around "head" with the right ones.

Robert

Hmmm

by modestmoose on Fri, 09/04/2010 - 16:26

I've found that "(head)(.*\n)*.*(/head)" works great for the (head) tags because there is only one (head) tag in an html document.

But, when I replaced (head) with (table) and (/head) with (/table) I realized that "(table)(.*\n)*.*(/table)" searches for the last (/table) tag in the entire document.

What I would like to do is have it search for the next (/table) tag that appears in the document, not the last one. Can I do this easily?

Stingy (Minimal) Matching

by Robert Schwenn on Fri, 09/04/2010 - 19:39

You should search the docs for "Stingy (Minimal) Matching" as at the bottom of this page:
http://www.jedit.org/users-guide/regexps.html

It works!!!

by modestmoose on Sat, 10/04/2010 - 20:01

So, I ended up messing around with it and I got this to work: "(table(.*\n)*?(/table)". I took the closing bracket off of (table) because tables in html usually have extra modifiers stuck in the tag. The ? effectively stops it at the first instance of (/table). Let me know if this is NOT the right way to do this, it seems to work though. Thanks everyone.

Thanks everybody.

by modestmoose on Sat, 10/04/2010 - 20:34

Perfect

by modestmoose on Fri, 09/04/2010 - 16:05

Robert, you are a lifesaver, thank you. What does (.*\n)*.* do exactly? Anyway, it works great. You saved me having to do this manually 5 times a week. I appreciate it.

Brian

".*" means: any number of any

by Robert Schwenn on Fri, 09/04/2010 - 19:36

".*" means: any number of any characters. But since jEdit doesn't recognize the new line as "any" character I used a Workaround:
"(.*\n)*": any number of: "any number of any characters plus a new line"

Regular Expressions are very powerful but not easy every time Eye-wink

See:
http://www.jedit.org/users-guide/regexps.html
http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/regex/Pattern.html
http://www.regular-expressions.info/tutorial.html

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