Use regular expressions to add new class to element using search/replace - html

Question

I want to add a NewClass value to the class attribute and modify the text of the span using find/replace functionality with a pair of regular expressions.
<div>
<span class='customer' id='phone$0'>Home</span>
<br/>
<span class='customer' id='phone$1'>Business</span>
<br/>
<span class='customer' id='phone$2'>Mobile</span>
</div>
I am trying to get the following result using after search/replace:
<span class='customer NewClass' id='phone$1'>Organization</span>
Also curious to know if a single find/replace operation can been used for both tasks?

Answer 1

Regex can do this, but be aware the using regex to change HTML can have a lot of edge cases that you may not have accounted for.
This regex101 example shows those three <span> elements changed to add NewClass and the contents to be changed to Organization.
Other technologies, however, would be safer. jQuery, for example, could replace them regardless of the order of the attributes:
$("span#phone$1").addClass("NewClass");
$("span#phone$1").text("Organization");
So just be careful with it, and you should be fine.
EDIT
According to comments on the OP, you want to only change the span containing ID phone$1, so the regex101 link has been updated to reflect this.
EDIT 2
Permalink was too long to fit into a comment, so adding the permalink here. Click on the "Content" tab at the bottom to see the replacement.

Answer 2

You can use a regex like this:
'.*?' id='phone\$1'>.*?<
With substitution string:
'customer' id='phone\$1'>Organization<
Working demo
Php code
$re = "/'.*?' id='phone\\$1'>.*?</";
$str = "<div>\n <span class='customer' id='phone\$0'>Home</span>\n<br/>\n <span class='customer' id='phone\$1'>Business</span>\n<br/>\n <span class='customer' id='phone\$2'>Mobile</span>\n</div>";
$subst = "'customerNewClass' id='phone\$1'>Organization<";
$result = preg_replace($re, $subst, $str);
Result
<div>
<span class='customer' id='phone$0'>Home</span>
<br/>
<span class='customerNewClass' id='phone$1'>Organization</span>
<br/>
<span class='customer' id='phone$2'>Mobile</span>
</div>

Answer 3

Since your tags include preg_match and preg_replace, I think you are using PHP.
Regex is generally not a good idea to manipulate HTML or XML. See RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags SO post.
In PHP, you can use DOMDocument and DOMXPath with //span[#id="phone$1"] xpath (get all span tags with id attribute vlaue equal to phone$1):
$html =<<<DATA
<div>
<span class='customer' id='phone$0'>Home</span>
<br/>
<span class='customer' id='phone$1'>Business</span>
<br/>
<span class='customer' id='phone$2'>Mobile</span>
</div>
DATA;
$dom = new DOMDocument('1.0', 'UTF-8');
$dom->loadHTML($html, LIBXML_HTML_NOIMPLIED | LIBXML_HTML_NODEFDTD);
$xp = new DOMXPath($dom);
$sps = $xp->query('//span[#id="phone$1"]');
foreach ($sps as $sp) {
$sp->setAttribute('class', $sp->getAttribute('class') . ' NewClass');
$sp->nodeValue = 'Organization';
}
echo $dom->saveHTML();
See IDEONE demo
Result:
<div>
<span class="customer" id="phone$0">Home</span>
<br>
<span class="customer NewClass" id="phone$1">Organization</span>
<br>
<span class="customer" id="phone$2">Mobile</span>
</div>