Regex for find pattern and insert between

[SBH]

I'm in dire need of your regex expertise. I'd like to find a pair of markdown comments and insert some text between them.

Here are the comments:

<!-- {{Start}} -->
<!-- {{End}} -->

which as a string evaluates to

"<!-- {{Start}} -->\n<!-- {{End}} -->".

Here's my desired output after the find and insert:

<!-- {{Start}} -->
Hello World
<!-- {{End}} -->

Any ideas?

[rywhale]

Does it have to be regex? Or could you just replace the chunk of string starting with the comment tag ?

# Imports
library(stringr)


test_str <- "<!-- {{Start}} -->\n<!-- {{End}} -->"

to_replace <- "Start}} -->\n<"

stringr::str_replace(test_str, coll(to_replace), "Start}} -->\nHello World!<")
#> [1] "<!-- {{Start}} -->\nHello World!<!-- {{End}} -->"

^{Created on 2019-08-14 by the reprex package (v0.3.0)}

PS - from the docs for stringr::str_replace, explains use of coll()

Generally, for matching human text, you'll want coll() which respects character matching rules for the specified locale.

[SBH]

This solved it! Thank you.

[SBH]

Also here's how you could do it with regex

to_replace <- "<!-- {{Start}} -->\n<!-- {{End}} -->"
replacement <-  "Hello World"

stringr::str_replace(to_replace,
                     stringr::regex("Start\\}\\} -->.*\\<",dotall = T),
                     paste0("Start}} -->\\\n",replacement,"<"))

[stkrog]

Or with gsub:

test_str <- "<!-- {{Start}} -->\n<!-- {{End}} -->"
gsub("(<!-- \\{\\{Start\\}\\} -->)(\\n)(<!-- \\{\\{End\\}\\} -->)", "\\1\\\nHello World\\\n\\3", test_str)