Regex: match less than / more than symbols but not tags

[ultraniblet]

Hi guys,

I'm a bit stumped on a regular expression problem.

I want to match a "less than" symbol but not tag brackets in a string.

I'm assuming what I want to look for is a < which isn't followed by a > in the rest of the string.

Any ideas how to write that as a regex?

Many thanks!

[7stud]

You could remove all the pairs:

/<[^>]*>/

and replace them with "", and then search for the singletons.

[ultraniblet]

Thanks a lot for that. Is there a way I could put the tags back in afterwards?

I'm basically validating a string to make sure all less than /more than symbols are HTML formatted, and want to leave the tags intact.

Nice one

[ultraniblet]

I think this works ...

/<(?=[^>]*<)/g

"<b> < lorem < </b>" to "<b> &lt; lorem &lt; </b>"

Man Regex is a double hard b*stard!

[7stud]

Thanks a lot for that. Is there a way I could put the tags back in afterwards?

Uhmm...do the replace on a copy of the original?