Can RegEx Do This?

[trevorsg]

I have a function that is run at the end of each page. This function takes the entire HTML output from PHP and then does some extra stuff to it.

One thing it does is change mailto links into a <form> that is submitted to a contact page so the client doesn't have to have an email client.

All the content on the site is updated by a PHP script that takes form data from a content page and places it in the respective locations. When a user goes to the content page, the forms already contain the content for the respective place on the site. So, the question is:

I need to add a way for the super function (that takes in the entire HTML output) to ignore anything that is in a form. More specifically, when the function uses RegEx to match mailto links, it needs to IGNORE those between <textarea></textarea> tags.

Does this make sense? Please ask for clarification if needed.

Thanks,
Trevor

[sneakyimp]

It sounds like a very tricky exercise in regex expression writing but it may be possible. Personally, I think you'd be better off parsing the html with an xml parser into some kind of DOM tree that you can traverse to make those changes. PHP can also do XML/DOM parsing (check the code samples here at phpbuilder). You might want to think about using a Javascript onLoad function to do it.