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I have got a shapefile that contains ESRI formatting tags in the column I want to use for labeling the layer in QGIS. The following is an example for a label of one feature (3 Labels in different colors for one feature):

<CLR red='110' green='110' blue='110'>ST-SUD-VL-03-1</CLR>
<CLR red='0' green='92' blue='230'>ST-SUD-XX-03</CLR>
<CLR red='110' green='110' blue='110'>ST-SUD-XX-02</CLR>

As far as I know there is no support for inline styling in QGIS yet: https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/pull/2856

As it is not possible to use these tags for coloring the labels I would like to get rid of the tags to have a clean column that just contains the text that should appear on the map.

I know how to use 'replace' in the expression builder but haven't found out how use wildcards. For example i want to delete all <CRL> ***</CLR> -Tags but as the color-values are not static I cannot use a static replace-expression.

Any idea how to extract everything between the three opening- and closing- <CLR>-tag?

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  • Just tried to answer and then re-read the Q. For your example thats the attribute for one feature and you want the label to read "ST-SUD-VL-03-1 ST-SUD-VL-03-03 ST-SUD-VL-03-02" - ie space separated?
    – Spacedman
    Feb 14, 2017 at 8:28
  • @Spacedman yes, exactly. space separated or with a special character used for line break
    – Thomas B
    Feb 14, 2017 at 8:45
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    Since your string format is quite fixed, a bunch of nested regexp replaces should do it - sadly I seem to have completelybroken labelling on my QGIS install while messing around with this so I can't do it at the moment! It might also be at the complexity level where writing a new expression in python would be easier.
    – Spacedman
    Feb 14, 2017 at 9:56
  • @markgraeflerland All the code posted (three lines) is stored in the same field and in that way for the current feature?
    – mgri
    Feb 14, 2017 at 10:05
  • @mgri: yes. all stored in one field and for one feature. Some of them have 1 line, some 2 and some 3 lines of labeling-text
    – Thomas B
    Feb 14, 2017 at 10:22

1 Answer 1

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As long as there's no more angle brackets in the label string, the expression:

regexp_replace(L, '<[^>]*>','')

should do it, where L is your attribute name. enter image description here

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  • that's a great solution as it works for other esri-formatting-tags, too ( desktop.arcgis.com/en/arcmap/10.3/map/working-with-text/… )
    – Thomas B
    Feb 14, 2017 at 11:23
  • I wasn;t expecting it to work because the help talks about it not supporting non greedy regular expressions so I thought it would replace everything from the first < to the last >, thus losing everything, rather than doing several replaces...
    – Spacedman
    Feb 14, 2017 at 11:25

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