From: Andrew Timberlake <andrew@...>
Date: 2009-04-10T16:05:21+09:00
Subject: Re: regex woes with breaklines

On Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 1:03 AM, Aa Wilson <aawilso1@vt.edu> wrote:
> Hello, all.  I've been banging my head against this for a little bit,
> and I'm no closer to a solution.  The issue is that I have a string
> where I would like to gsub all line ends ('\n' or '\r\n') into '<br />',
> while preserving the line ends.  The catch is that I don't want to gsub
> anything that looks like '<br />\r\n' or '<br />\n', to prevent my gsub
> from inserting breaklines on subsequent edits of this string.  I've
> tried gsub with the regex /(?!<br\s*\/>)($)[^\z]/, but haven't had any
> luck getting it to match.  For example, on the string
> "test\r\ntest<br>\r\ntest", it will match both of the '\r\n' sets,
> instead of only the first one (which would be optimal).
>
> Thanks in advance for your time.

Replace the <br> along with the new line
Also remember that a new line can be CR (Mac), LF (Linux) or CRLF (Windows)

s = "test\r\ntest<br>\r\ntest\ntest\rtest<br/>\ntest"
s.gsub(/(?:<br *\/*>)*(?:\r\n|\n|\r)/, "<br />\n")
#=> "test<br />\ntest<br />\ntest<br />\ntest<br />\ntest<br />\ntest"

Andrew Timberlake
http://ramblingsonrails.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewtimberlake

"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education" - Mark Twain