How to filter   in textarea with regex?

Question

btw: i know that using regex is not the best idea in the world...

For example i have such input variants:

<p>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;</p>

or

<p>&nbsp; &nbsp;</p>

or

<p>&nbsp;</p>

and i want to check my input like: all except <p> with   in every amount of them (0, 1 or 50)...

i wrote such expression:

/[^<p>(\s*&nbsp;\s*)*<\/p>]/ig

and seems that it works, but!

for example i have such input:

<p>&nbsp; &nbsp;t&nbsp;</p>

or

<p>&nbsp; &nbsp;tttt&nbsp;tttt</p>

and it is thinking, that it is equal to my regex...

not a good idea...

what i do wrong in my regex? or maybe there are some better ways of solving this?

Answer 1

Assuming you want to eliminate all <P>'s with only nbsp; (or more) inside them : then :

Assuming you have this

var a='a<p>&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;</p>c<p>&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;</p>d<p>&nbsp;aa &nbsp;&nbsp;</p>e';

And assuming the yellow part has to go : becuase it contains aa inside :

You'll be left with all except the problematic P with pure nbsps :

Then this code :

a=a.replace(/(<p>.*?<\/p>)/g, function(match, p1 ) {
  if (/^<p>(\s*&nbsp;\s*)*<\/p>$/ig.test(p1)) 
  return '';
  else return p1;
})

Will yield :

acd<p>&nbsp;aa &nbsp;&nbsp;</p>e

As you can see - the P tag wasn't removed because of aa

http://jsbin.com/cizidayeru/3/edit