Regex - match anything between href=" and " that contains ä

**boognish** · Nov 30, 2012 02:01

I'm trying to do a regex find replace on a load of links that contain foreign characters such as ä and replacing them with their encoded version %C3%A4.

For example. I would want to replace
<a href="wähle.html">Wähle</a>
to
<a href="w%C3%A4hle.html">Wähle</a>

Can anyone tell me how I do this?

**Pullo** · Nov 30, 2012 05:22

Hi,

What are you using to do this?
Dreamweaver? A scripting language like Ruby?

Something like this maybe:

Code Ruby:

l = '<a href="wähle.html">Wähle</a>'
h = l.match(/href=".*?"/).to_s.gsub(/ä/, "ae")
l = l.sub(/href=".*?"/, h)

Bit ugly, but it does the job.

**boognish** · Nov 30, 2012 11:45

Thanks for your reply! I'm using a program called powergrep which can search regex statements and replace with what I want. So in my original example in the replace field I put '%C3%A4', but what regex can I use in the search field to match anything between href=" and " that contains ä?

**Pullo** · Nov 30, 2012 13:00

Hi,
I was just about to download Powergrep to try it out, then I saw it cost 120€. Oops

So, let me understand: You have a folder full of html files and want to use Powergrep to search through all of these files, line for line, and replace any occurrences of foreign characters within a href attribute with their encoded version. I.e. href="wähle.html" would become href="w%C3%A4hle.html".
Is that correct?

**boognish** · Nov 30, 2012 14:27

Yes that's exactly right, any ideas?

Powergrep is a great program, I use it a lot, definitely worth the money!

**Pullo** · Nov 30, 2012 15:00

Hi,

I downloaded Powergrep (test version) and I've got your answer (I hope).

In Powergrep:

With your directory selected, go to the Action tab
Select search and replace
Set Search type to Regular expression
In Search enter: href="(.*?)"
In replace enter: href="$1"
Set a tick by "Extra processing. Perform a search and replace on the replacement text or collect text"
In extra processing search type "ä"
In extra processing replace type "%C3%A4"
Rinse and repeat

This works for me, put please use the preview function before altering anything.

I hope this helps you.