Regular expression for certain amount of characters

Question

I'm trying to change a lot of URLs with TextWrangler, those ending with m.htm should lose the m, but only if the total number of characters in the filename is 7. Those with fewer characters should not be changed.

I've tried

/.*?{7}m.htm/

but it doesn't work...

What is the solution?

Answer 1

Replace

href="([^"]*)\/(.{6})m.htm([^"]*)"

Meaning : href=" followed by any non " character until a / (the latest the better: greedy) then 6 character followed by a m, then any non " character.

By

href="\1\/\2.htm\3"

Meaning :

\1 = [^"]*
\2 = .{6}
\3 = [^"]*

Example

<a href="google.com/foo/bar/urzadjm.htm">testM</a> 
\1 : google.com/foo/bar
\2 : urzadj
\3 : <empty>

If files can be htm and php, I suggest to replace .htm by (.htm|.php) (!Warning to back-references change in numbers!)

Answer 2

May be

/\b.{6}m\.htm/

That is, starting on the word boundary, followed by any 6 symbols, followed by m.htm.