Re: Another replace regexp with list question

[Barry Margolin <barmar@alum.mit.edu>]

In article <mailman.1310.1370826222.22516.help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>,
 Leandro Marcolino <leandromarcolino@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello, everyone!..
> 
> This time I am trying to find occurrences of:
> 
> "<span style='color:white'>&#31169;&#31169;&#31169;&#31169;</span>", but
> the number of &#31169; can change from 1 to many.
> 
> And I want to replace each &#31169; of the list to a white space (besides
> removing the <span> clause). So, if there were x "&#31169;", I need x " ".
> Is it possible to do this using replace-regexp?.. Of course I can't just
> look for "&#31169;" and replace to " ", because I have occurrences of
> "&#31169;" that are not inside the group "<span
> style='color:white'></span>".
> 
> I tried something like "<span style='color:white'>\(\(&#31169;\)+\)</span>
> -> \,(cond (\1 " ")))", but then I lose the information of how many
> "&#31169;" were there, and everything changes to a single " "....
> 
> Thanks for your help!.. :)
> 
> Regards,
> Leandro

Regular expressions can't count.

I would do it with a keyboard macro. Search for the span, mark it as a 
region, narrow to region, use replace-string to replace each &#31169 
with space, widen.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar@alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
*** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me ***