How to remove some css properties using regular expression?

Question

\"outline-style: none; margin: 0px; padding: 2px; background-color: #eff0f8; color: #3b3a39; font-family: Georgia,\'Times New Roman\',Times,serif; font-size: 14px; f         


        

Answer 1

I don't know about the details of your programming environment, but you asked for a regular expression. This regular expression will find property keys (plus colon and any space) as group 1 ($1) and property values as group 2 ($2):

 ((?:background|font)(?:[^:]+):(?:\\s*))([^;]+)

The expression does not remove the property values. It finds them. How you remove them depends on your programming environment (language/libraries).

But basically, you would be doing a global find/replace, replacing the whole result with $1.

For example, using Java you could do this

public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {

    String[] lines = {
        "outline-style: none; margin: 0px; padding: 2px; background-color: #eff0f8; color: #3b3a39; font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 18px; orphans: 2; text-align: center; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; border: 1px solid #ebebeb; float: left;",
        "outline-style: none; margin: 0px; padding: 2px; background-color: #eff0f8; color: #3b3a39; font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 18px; orphans: 2; text-align: center; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; border: 1px solid #ebebeb; float: left",
        "background-color: #eff0f8;",
        "background-color: #eff0f8",
    };

    String regex = "((?:background|font)(?:[^:]+):(?:\\s*))([^;]+)";

    Pattern p = Pattern.compile(regex);

    for (String s: lines) {
        StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer();
        Matcher m = p.matcher(s);
        while (m.find()) {

            // capturing group(2) for debug purpose only
            // just to get it's length so we can fill that with '-' 
            // to assist comparison of before and after
            String text = m.group(2);
            text = text.replaceAll(".", "-");
            m.appendReplacement(sb, "$1"+text);

            // for non-debug mode, just use this instead
            // m.appendReplacement(sb, "$1");
        }
        m.appendTail(sb);

        System.err.println("> " + s); // before
        System.err.println("< " +sb.toString()); // after
        System.err.println();
    }
}