Using Regex in Java to "transform" a css style in html tag style

Question

I have a HTML code stored in a String variable in a Java code, in this string I have something like this:

<span style="text-decoration: underline;">test</span>

And I want something like this

<u>test</u>

Or if I have this:

<span style="color: #2873ee; text-decoration: underline;">test</span>

I want this:

<font color="#2873ee"><u>test</u></font>

Using regex I can do this:

affectedString.replaceAll("<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">(.*?)<\\/span>", "<u>$1</u>");

and

affectedString.replaceAll("<span style=\"color:\\s*?(#[A-Fa-f0-9]{6}|[A-Fa-f0-9]{3}); text-decoration: underline;\">(.*?)<\\/span>", "<u><font color=\"$1\">$2</u></font>");

Easy right? But I have a few issues and also I don't like this code. First, why I don't like this? because I need to use this in css style of: Underline, Color and Line-through, and write every case of coincidence is not a good code, for example:

affectedString.replaceAll("<span style=\"color:\\s*?(#[A-Fa-f0-9]{6}|[A-Fa-f0-9]{3}); text-decoration: underline;\">(.*?)<\\/span>", "<u><font color=\"$1\">$2</u></font>");
affectedString.replaceAll("<span style=\"text-decoration: underline; color:\\s*?(#[A-Fa-f0-9]{6}|[A-Fa-f0-9]{3});\">(.*?)<\\/span>", "<u><font color=\"$2\">$1</u></font>");

And the issues is this don't work with a code like:

<span style="text-decoration: underline;">test <span style="text-decoration: line-through;">two</span></span>

In that case when I try to apply the regex, the portion matches until the first </span>, so the final result is:

<u>test<span style="text-decoration:line-through;">two</u></span>

This is when I match the text-decoration:underline, then when I match the text-decoration:line-through. The second result is:

<u>test <strike>two</u></strike>

When the expected result is

<u>test <strike>two</strike></u>

My questions are, what regex I can use to solve this type of issues? And there is a better solution to "transform" that simple css into the html tags?

Thanks

Any regex you or some other answerer offers for such task will be complicated, bug-prone and ugly looking. You definetly need some kind of html analyzer/parser for this — Alex Salauyou
– Alex Salauyou, Commented Mar 3, 2016 at 12:46

msp · Accepted Answer · 2016-03-03 12:48:49Z

1

I'd advise against using regex. It isn't easy to debug/extend and gets nasty pretty fast. You could use a library like jsoup to parse the HTML, traverse the DOM and use CSS selectors to get Elements. E.g. to get all divs with a class attribute you'd use

Elements divs = doc.select("div[class]");

answered Mar 3, 2016 at 12:48

msp

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