Refactoring starting place for regex - regex

Question

I have a function that stripes HTML markup to display inside of a text element.
stripChar: function stripChar(string) {
string = string.replace(/<\/?[^>]+(>|$)/g, "")
string = string.trim()
string = string.replace(/(\n{2,})/gm,"\n\n");
string = string.replace(/…/g,"...")
string = string.replace(/ /g,"")
let changeencode = entities.decode(string);
return changeencode;
}
This has worked great for me, but I have a new requirement and Im struggle to work out where I should start refactoring the code above. I still need to stripe out the above, but I have 2 exceptions;
List items, <ul><li>, I need to handle these so that they still appear as a bullet point
Hyperlinks, I want to use the react-native-hyperlink, so I need to leave intack the <a> for me to handle separately
Whilst the function is great for generalise tag replacement, its less flexible for my needs above.

Answer 1

You may use
stripChar: function stripChar(string) {
string = string.replace(/ |<(?!\/?(?:li|ul|a)\b)\/?[^>]+(?:>|$)/g, "");
string = string.trim();
string = string.replace(/\n{2,}/g,"\n\n");
string = string.replace(/…/g,"...")
let changeencode = entities.decode(string);
return changeencode;
}
The main changes:
.replace(/ /g,"") is moved to the first replace
The first replace is now used with a new regex pattern where the li, ul and a tags are excluded from the matches using a negative lookahead (?!\/?(?:li|ul|a)\b).
See the updated regex demo here.