'How to match the beginning and end of a plain text table (+---+---+) with regex?
Plain text tables as exported by pandoc look like this:
+------+-------+
| x | y |
+======+=======+
| 1 | 4 |
| 2 | 5 |
| 3 | 6 |
+------+-------+
goal: find such tables and surround them to with "```" in the line before and after the table
```
+------+-------+
| x | y |
+======+=======+
| 1 | 4 |
| 2 | 5 |
| 3 | 6 |
+------+-------+
```
(I escaped the "`" otherwise it marks code block boundaries and ends the just started code block)
I can find the horizontal cell dividers with regex ^\+.*\+$.
...but I suppose I need to find the top and bottom one with a look-aheads and look-behinds to check no further of +| which mark borders of the table exist in the next or previous line. But, I can't figure out how. Someone got some ideas?
Solution 1:[1]
You can try matching:
\+-+\+-+\+[\s\S]+?\+-+\+-+\+
then replace with:
`$&`
Explanation - all those plus signs :-)
\+ - match a literal +
-+ - match a hyphen - one or more times
\+ - match a literal +
-+ - match a hyphen - one or more times
\+ - match a literal +
[\s\S]+? match any character one or more times (NON greedy = as few as possible) - this includes newlines
\+ - match a literal +
-+ - match a hyphen - one or more times
\+ - match a literal +
-+ - match a hyphen - one or more times
\+ - match a literal +
Now replace with the whole match surrounded with back-ticks
Set the global flag to replace all.
Solution 2:[2]
You haven't said what programming language you are working with.
The fillowing example works in Python.
Regex Pattern, using flag s include newline in . .
As the header line begins with the beginning of a line ^ and the footer line ends with a line end $ we shouldn't have any problems.
I have forbidden the string -+- to avoid capturing 2 tables at a time, with everything in between, if we have 2 tables on the same page.
"^(\+(-+\+)+((?!(-+-)).)*\+(-+\+)+)$"gms
Substituting with
```\n\1\n```
Sources
This article follows the attribution requirements of Stack Overflow and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Source: Stack Overflow
| Solution | Source |
|---|---|
| Solution 1 | Poul Bak |
| Solution 2 |