How do I find and replace HTML?

[johncaiwa]

I want to find all “strike” tags and replace them with “del” tags.

[cqg]

Regular “Find and replace” feature should work.

[kleinerpirat]

To prevent making Counterstrike Counterdel in your note content, use the following RegEx:

Find

<strike>(.*?)</strike>

Replace With

<del>$1</del>

[johncaiwa]

That worked, thanks!

Where can I find out more info about what (.*?) and $1 do?

Did you know to do that off the top of your head, or did you look in the manual?

[Searching - Anki Manual]

[kleinerpirat]

That’s regular expression syntax (specifically for Rust, the programming language that Anki uses for backend operations).

Regular expressions (also called “regex” or “RegEx”) are a way of specifying patterns in text. They are used to find, match, and manipulate text strings.

A regular expression consists of a sequence of characters that defines a search pattern. These characters can be ordinary characters (like “a” or “5”), or special characters (like “*” or “?”) that have a special meaning.

(.*?) creates a so-called capture group for arbitrary text between the <strike> tags, and with $1 we reference that group, i.e. we tell Anki to insert capture group 1 in the replacement.

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Similar to JavaScript support in templates, this is an advanced feature of Anki that caters to the tech-savy userbase. Therefore you won’t find a tutorial on it in the manual.

If you’re interested to learn more, I can highly recommend https://regexr.com/ as a playground.

[johncaiwa]

Before, Anki would use the following for color:

<font color="#aa00ff"><b>と思いきや</b></font>

Then I updated Anki in July of last year, from then it does color like this:

<span style="color: rgb(170, 0, 255);"><b>そばから</b></span>

Since it was an update, I am assuming the latter has some benefits?

So, using your code above, to change the old font tags to span tags:

Find

<font color="#aa00ff"><b>(.*?)</b></font>

Replace With

<span style="color: rgb(170, 0, 255);"><b>$1</b></span>

This would work, right? I guess I would also have to find both <font color="#aa00ff"><b> and <b><font color="#aa00ff">, since I probably bolded first sometimes.

[dae]

I believe the color changes are an implementation byproduct rather than a deliberate change. Your example looks reasonable at first glance; when in doubt, create a backup first so you can revert if anything goes wrong.