Regular expression to replace string except in sqaure brackets

Question

Need to replace all forward-slash (/) with > except for the ones in the square brackets

input string:

string str = "//div[1]/li/a[@href='https://www.facebook.com/']";

Tried pattern (did not work):

string regex = @"\/(?=$|[^]]+\||\[[^]]+\]\/)";
var pattern = Regex.Replace(str, regex, ">");

Expected Result:

">>div[1]>li>a[@href='https://www.facebook.com/']"

Answer 1

Your thinking was good with lookbehind but instead positive use negative.

(?<!\[[^\]]*)(\/)

Demo

After updating your c# code

string pattern = @"(?<!\[[^\]]*)(\/)";
string input = "//div[1]/li/a[@href='https://www.facebook.com/']";
var result = Regex.Replace(input, pattern, ">");

You will get

>>div[1]>li>a[@href='https://www.facebook.com/']