Replacement Problem

Is there any way or program to solve this kind of replacement. I have the text file which contains:

<a>word1</a><b>---</b>

<a>word2</a><b>---</b>

<a>word3</a><b>---</b>

etc... and lot of other text

I want to replace first --- with word1, second --- with word2, etc

Those words can be any kind of words like flower, people, beer... but the brackets (<a></a><b></b>) are the same.

Is it possible to make all replacements AT ONCE? And how?

The program like PowerGREP maybe could do this but I don't know how.

Thanks if you can help.

 

Are the bold tags always going to be the next element? Is there a container you can hook those anchors off of without pissing clasess onto all the children?

<div class="moveA2B">
  <a>word1</a><b>---</b>
  <a>word1</a><b>---</b>
  <a>word1</a><b>---</b>
  <a>word1</a><b>---</b>
<!-- .moveA2B --></div>

Code (markup):

then for the scripting:

for (let anchor of document.querySelectorAll("moveA2B a") {
  anchor.nextElementSibling.textContent = anchor.textContent;
}

Code (markup):

Though I would question why you'd be doing this. Moving anchor text to a sibling element seems very strange.

 

Since you have a text file, just about any program that massages text files will do your job with a FOR/NEXT or DO WHILE/ENDDO loop.

If it were me, I would write FoxPro function with a few lines of code to do the job. Same can be done with any other language supporting text files.