How to find rich text tag matches within other tags using Regex?

Unity Engine
1

Hello everybody! :slight_smile:
I have this one problem, what pattern I should use to find all rich text color tags within other color tags?

So for example I have this input:
<color=yellow>Hello <color=cyan>World!</color></color>

And remove, by replacing with empty string matched tags and have this as an input after:
<color=yellow>Hello World!</color>

It could be even more tags within, for example:
<color=yellow>Hello my <color=cyan>name</color> is <color=gray>Kite <color=white>Watson!</color></color></color>

And have this after:
<color=yellow>Hello my name is Kite Watson!</color>

The reason I need this is because I use Regex to apply code highlighter to text in text box and some keywords are colorized within comments, like in below example

5051990--495809--wefwef.PNG

So I want to check and remove if there are any color tags within color tags, like in this comment example.

I’m pretty new to Regex, so currently a bit lost and not sure what to do. Can someone give me some advice on how can I accomplish this? :slight_smile: Thank you!

2

Do you have a functioning regex to find one color tag and retrieve its inner text? If so, you can just run that again on the inner text.

3

Hey there! Thanks for the reply! :slight_smile: The issue is that I have no idea how to create a pattern that would get inner rich tags, I am kind of new to Regex. Could you give me some advice on what regex pattern I should use for this purpose? :slight_smile:

4

Do you need to preserve other tags, and are there multiple instances of inner/outer colors on the same line? What I mean is do you have things like this?

<color=yellow><b><color=red>Bold stuff</color></b></b>blah blah no color<color=blue><color=red>other stuff</color></color>

Also, are all your color tags closing on the same line they open, and do your lines always start with the color tag you want to keep?

5

Hey there!
Thanks for the reply! What I ended up with is something like this:

    Regex tags = new Regex(@"<color=#.*?>|<\/color>");
    MatchCollection matches = tags.Matches(c);

    bool hasStarted = false;
    int innerTags = 0;

    const string tempStart = "¬¬¬¬¬¬¬Â";
    const string tempEnd = "Â~Â~Â~Â~";
    foreach (Match match in matches)
    {
        if (match.Value.Contains("<color=#"))
        {
            if (hasStarted)
            {
                var cBuilder = new StringBuilder(c);
                cBuilder.Remove(match.Index, match.Length);
                cBuilder.Insert(match.Index, tempStart);

                c = cBuilder.ToString();

                innerTags++;
            }
            else
            {
                hasStarted = true;
            }
        }
        else if (match.Value.Equals("</color>"))
        {
            if (innerTags > 0)
            {
                var cBuilder = new StringBuilder(c);
                cBuilder.Remove(match.Index, match.Length);
                cBuilder.Insert(match.Index, tempEnd);

                c = cBuilder.ToString();

                innerTags--;
            }
            else if (innerTags <= 0)
            {
                hasStarted = false;
            }
        }
    }
    c = c.Replace(tempStart, string.Empty);
    c = c.Replace(tempEnd, string.Empty);

It works quite well, but still need to do more checking, the problem is that, I apply these rich text tags as a code highlighter, to my text in the textbox, but the issue is that what if I write a comment and I include a color tag that doesn’t have a closing, I need to check and if found one like that, close it so it wouldn’t cause any issues. I have some ideas on how to do this, but are there any better ways in fixing this or even applying code highlighter in general, without using rich text tags?

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