How to remove text between tags in php?

Question

Despite using PHP for years, I\'ve never really learnt how to use expressions to truncate strings properly... which is now biting me in the backside!

Can anyone prov

Answer 1

You don't need to capture the tags themselves. Just target the text between the tags and replace it with an empty string. Super simple.

Demo of both techniques

Code:

$string = 'text';
echo preg_replace('/]*>\K[^<]*/', '', $string);
// the opening tag--^^^^^^^^  ^^^^^-match everything before the end tag
//                          ^^-restart fullstring match

Output:

Or in fringe cases when the link text contains a <, use this: ~]*>\K.*?(?=)~

This avoids the expense of capture groups using a lazy quantifier, the fullstring restarting \K and a "lookahead".

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Older & wiser:

If you are parsing valid html, you should use a dom parser for stability/accuracy. Regex is DOM-ignorant, so if there is a tag attribute value containing a >, my snippet will fail.

As a narrowly suited domdocument solution to offer some context:

$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadHTML($string, LIBXML_HTML_NOIMPLIED | LIBXML_HTML_NODEFDTD); // 2nd params to remove DOCTYPE);
$dom->getElementsByTagName('a')[0]->nodeValue = '';
echo $dom->saveHTML();