Dreamweaver replace with regular expression

Question

I'm having a problem with a simple Find and Replace in Dreamweaver using a regex.

This is what's in my find box:

<div id="title">([^ö]*)</div>

This is what's in my replace box

<div id="title">
    <div class="center">
       $1
       <span>hello there</span>
    </div>
</div>

If I run the find and replace above on this:

<div id="title"><h1>Page title</h1></div>
<div class="content">
   more content
</div>

I can't get to this result:

<div id="title">
    <div class="center">
        <h1>Page title</h1>
        <span>hello there</span>
    </div>
</div>
<div class="content">
   more content
</div>

Because the content of de find box does not define that I only want the content between < div id="title" > and the first < /div >...

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Matching markup languages with regexes is tricky to say the least.

In your case (assuming that the <div> tags you're searching and replacing won't contain any nested <div> tags), you could get by with using

<div id="title">([\s\S]*?)</div>

as your search regex.

• [\s\S] matches any character, including linebreaks (that's more explicit than [^ö], I'd say).
• * matches zero or more of those
• ? makes the star "lazy", meaning that it will match as few characters as possible - thereby ensuring that the match will stop at the next </div>.