Insert After Head
We have a string with an HTML Document.
Write a regular expression that inserts <h1>Hello</h1>
immediately after <body>
tag. The tag may have attributes.
For instance:
let regexp = /your regular expression/;
let str = `
<html>
<body style="height: 200px">
...
</body>
</html>
`;
str = str.replace(regexp, `<h1>Hello</h1>`);
After that the value of str
should be:
<html>
<body style="height: 200px"><h1>Hello</h1>
...
</body>
</html>
In order to insert after the <body>
tag, we must first find it. We can use the regular expression pattern <body.*?>
for that.
In this task, we don’t need to modify the <body>
tag. We only need to add the text after it.
Here’s how we can do it:
let str = '...<body style="...">...';
str = str.replace(/<body.*?>/, '$&<h1>Hello</h1>');
alert(str); // ...<body style="..."><h1>Hello</h1>...
In the replacement string $&
means the match itself, that is, the part of the source text that corresponds to <body.*?>
. It gets replaced by itself plus <h1>Hello</h1>
.
An alternative is to use lookbehind:
let str = '...<body style="...">...';
str = str.replace(/(?<=<body.*?>)/, `<h1>Hello</h1>`);
alert(str); // ...<body style="..."><h1>Hello</h1>...
As you can see, there’s only lookbehind part in this regexp.
It works like this:
- At every position in the text.
- Check if it’s preceded by
<body.*?>
. - If it’s so, then we have the match.
The tag <body.*?>
won’t be returned. The result of this regexp is literally an empty string, but it matches only at positions preceded by <body.*?>
.
So it replaces the “empty line”, preceded by <body.*?>
, with <h1>Hello</h1>
. That’s the insertion after <body>
.
P.S. Regexp flags, such as s
and i
can also be useful: /<body.*?>/si
. The s
flag makes the dot .
match a newline character, and i
flag makes <body>
also match <BODY>
case-insensitively.