Regex replace hyphens in text excluding urls, tags and mails

Question

I am trying to replace hyphens in text to non-breaking hyphens, but I need to exlude all URLs, emails and tags. Here is some text I am trying to edit:

Some text with a link but also plain URL like http://another-domain.com and an e-mail [email protected] and e-shop and some relative URL like /test-url/on-this-website.

and I came up with this regex: (^|\s+)[^@|^\/]+(\s+|$)

But it cannot be used for preg_replace, it doesn't match hyphens, but whole text that contains dashes.

Result should be:

Some text with a <a href="https://some-domain.com/section-name" class="some-class">link</a> but also plain URL like http://another-domain.com and an e&#8209;mail [email protected] and e&#8209;shop and some relative URL like /test-url/on-this-website.

Have anyone been doing something similar?

Steven · Accepted Answer · 2021-02-16 12:39:22Z

0

There's a few issues with your regex...

You can't use | as an OR operator in your character class
Your regex is greedy
You can't use multiple not operators in a character class
You don't need to have more than one space matched at the start and end
Your character class swallows spaces

It seems to me that you're over thinking it; you could rephrase your task to: "replace hyphens in words"

(\s\w+)-(\w+\s)
(\s\w+)            : Capture group matching a white space and then 1 or more of the characters [a-zA-Z0-9_]
        -          : Match a hyphen
         (\w+\s)   : Capture group matching a white space and then 1 or more of the characters [a-zA-Z0-9_]

However, you can also use your more wide ranging character class like:

(\s[^@\/\s]+)-([^@\/\s]+\s)
(\s[^@\/\s]+)                : Capture group matching a space followed by 1 or more characters which aren't  @, /, or a space
             -               : Matches a hyphen
              ([^@\/\s]+\s)  : Capture group matching a space followed by 1 or more characters which aren't  @, /, or a space

$string = "Some text with a link but also plain URL like http://another-domain.com and an e-mail [email protected] and e-shop and some relative URL like /test-url/on-this-website.";

echo preg_replace("/(\s\w+)-(\w+\s)/", "$1&#8209;$2", $string);

echo preg_replace("/(\s[^@\/\s]+)-([^@\/\s]+\s)/", "$1&#8209;$2", $string);

Note: You may need to change the starting and closing space to include the start/end of a the string.

answered Feb 16, 2021 at 12:39

Steven

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1 Comment

hyst Over a year ago

Thank you for the explanation, I couldn't find proper group regex that would met all conditions. This is exactly what I needed!

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