Regular Expressions Cookbook

8.7. Add a cellspacing Attribute to <table> Tags That Do Not Already Include It

Problem

You want to search through an (X)HTML file and add cellspacing="0" to all tables that do not already include a cellspacing attribute.

This recipe serves as an example of adding an attribute to XML-style tags that do not already include it. You can swap in whatever tag and attribute names and values you prefer.

Solution

Regex 1: Simplistic solution

You can use negative lookahead to match <table> tags that do not contain the word cellspacing, as follows:

<table\b(?![^>]*?\scellspacing\b)([^>]*)>

Regex options: Case insensitive

Regex flavors: .NET, Java, JavaScript, PCRE, Perl, Python, Ruby

Here’s the regex again in free-spacing mode:

<table \b            # Match "<table", followed by a word boundary
(?!                  # Assert that the regex below cannot be matched here
  [^>]               #   Match any character except ">"...
    *?               #     zero or more times, as few as possible (lazy)
  \s cellspacing \b  #   Match "cellspacing" as a complete word
)                    #
(                    # Capture the regex below to backreference 1
  [^>]               #   Match any character except ">"...
    *                #     zero or more times, as many as possible (greedy)
)                    #
>                    # Match a literal ">" to end the tag

Regex options: Case insensitive

Regex flavors: .NET, Java, PCRE, Perl, Python, Ruby

Regex 2: More reliable solution

The following regex replaces both instances of the negated character class ‹[^>]› from the simplistic solution with ‹(?:[^>"']|"[^"]*"|'[^']*')›. This improves the regular expression’s reliability in two ways. First, it adds ...