I have a challenging mission in JS string manipulation:
There is a HTML string in which I need to replace a word at a specific word index. The word index is the number of the word when ignoring the HTML tags.
For example, here is the HTML string:
<span style="font-family:Times New Roman;">At times like this I don't know what to
do. Other times I have no problem.</span>
The task is to replace word number 2 in the html (which is the word times) with the text: <span style="color:red;">times</span>
So the final HTML string should be:
<span style="font-family:Times New Roman;">At <span style="color:red;">times</span>
like this I don't know what to do. Other times I have no problem.</span>
Any ideas for this challenge?
I would first find the word by tokenizing the filtered HTML, and then do the replacement.
Let's start from your string :
var html = '<span style="font-family:Times New Roman;">At times like this don\'t know what to do. Other times I have no problem.</span>';
Case 1, you want to replace all occurrences :
var tokens = html.replace(/<[^>]*>/g,'').split(/\W+/).filter(Boolean);
var newHTML = html.replace(new RegExp('\\b'+tokens[1]+'\\b', 'g'), function(s){
return '<span style="color:red;">'+s+'</span>'
});
Demonstration
Case 2, you just want to replace the word at the specified index (this one is surprisingly tricky) :
var tokens = html.replace(/<[^>]*>/g,'').split(/\W+/).filter(Boolean);
var wordToReplaceIndex = 1, wordToReplace = tokens[wordToReplaceIndex];
var occIndex = 0;
for (var i=0; i<wordToReplaceIndex; i++) {
if (tokens[i]===wordToReplace) occIndex++;
}
i=0;
var newHTML = html.replace(new RegExp('\\b'+wordToReplace+'\\b', 'g'), function(s){
return (i++===occIndex) ? '<span style="color:red;">'+s+'</span>' : s
});
Demonstration
Alternate solution for case 2 :
var i=0, wordToReplaceIndex = 1;
var newHTML = html.replace(/>([^<]+)</, function(txt) {
return txt.replace(/\w+/g, function(s) {
return i++==wordToReplaceIndex ? '<span style="color:red;">'+s+'</span>' : s;
})
});
Can you spot why the second one was tricky ? ;)
I think a decent solution would be to split and replace then join. Here's an example:
<div id="replace-me">Hello, world</div>
replaceWordAtIndex = function (text, index, replacement) {
text = text.split(' ');
text[index] = replacement;
text = text.join(' ');
return text;
}
wrapWordAtIndex = function (text, index, before, after) {
text = text.split(' ');
text[index] = before + text[index] + after;
text = text.join(' ');
return text;
}
var obj = document.getElementById('replace-me');
obj.innerText = replaceWordAtIndex(obj.innerText, 1, 'Universe');
obj.innerHTML = wrapWordAtIndex(obj.innerText, 1, '<b>', '</b>');
Should result in:
<div id="replace-me">Hello, <b>Universe</b></div>
And here's a JSFiddle for you to see it in action
function smartReplace(str,index,strReplace){
var wStart=0,wEnd=0;
var startInd=str.indexOf(">")+1;
var wc=0;
for(i=startInd;i<str.length;i++)
{
if (str.charAt(i) == ' ')
{
wc=wc+1;
if (wc==index)
{
wEnd=i-1;
break;
}
wStart=i+1;
}
}
var newString = str.substring(0,wStart) + strReplace + str.substring((wEnd +1),(str.length-1));
document.write(newString);
}
> call the smartReplace() like follows
var str1="<span style=\"font-family:Times New Roman;\">At times like this I don't know what to do. Other times I have no problem.</span>)";
smartReplace(str1,3,"<span style=\"color:red;\">times</span>");
var html = '<span style="font-family:Times New Roman;">At times like this don\'t know what to do. Other times I have no problem.</span>';
var tokens = html.replace("Times","<span style="color:red;">times</span>");
ive been using this jQuery plugin to replace/edit text in any part of the DOM. quite helpful and easy to use with complete REGEX support
http://benalman.com/projects/jquery-replacetext-plugin/