PHP regex: Selectively strip text between HTML tags

Question

I'm adding schema (description) to our product pages, all of which are dynamically generated, so I'm looking to add a good general purpose regular expression to properly format said description.

So here's what I'm currently working with (spaced a little oddly for ease of reading):

<meta itemprop="description" content="
    <?php 
        $original_desc = $_product->getShortDescription();
        $schema_desc = preg_replace('Rocking REGEX theoretically goes here','$1 $2', $original_desc);
        strip_tags($schema_desc);
        echo $schema_desc; 
    ?>
">

Problem is, our product descriptions are being pulled from the admin of our CMS, so the formatting is a little squirrelly.

Here's what they look like:

 content="<p><strong>Product Title</strong> - Other Product Name - <em>Blah Blah</em></p>
 <p><strong>Product Heading 1</strong> </p>
 <p><strong>Product Heading 2:</strong>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Cras vulputate pellentesque sem, id mattis sem blandit at. 
    Suspendisse tempus sodales enim nec aliquam. Vestibulum laoreet tincidunt dui, sit amet laoreet ipsum gravida at. Nulla in tempus justo, 
    et bibendum dolor.</p>
    <p><strong>Product Heading 3:</strong> Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Cras vulputate pellentesque 
    sem, id mattis sem blandit at. Suspendisse tempus sodales enim nec aliquam. Vestibulum laoreet tincidunt dui, sit amet laoreet ipsum gravida at. 
    Nulla in tempus justo, et bibendum dolor.</p>"

So here's what I want to do - I want to KEEP the text between the first two  tags because that's the product category/title, but all the subsequent text between  tags are simply headings that have no usefulness in a search description, so I'd like to remove it. I've found ways to say, strip ALL the text from between ALL the  tags, but not all but the first.

Thanks!

gwillie · Accepted Answer · 2013-12-05 01:03:10Z

1

I'd recommend DomDocument here

$str = <<<STR
<p><strong>Product Title</strong> - Other Product Name - <em>Blah Blah</em></p>
 <p><strong>Product Heading 1</strong> </p>
 <p><strong>Product Heading 2:</strong>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Cras vulputate pellentesque sem, id mattis sem blandit at. 
    Suspendisse tempus sodales enim nec aliquam. Vestibulum laoreet tincidunt dui, sit amet laoreet ipsum gravida at. Nulla in tempus justo, 
    et bibendum dolor.</p>
    <p><strong>Product Heading 3:</strong> Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Cras vulputate pellentesque 
    sem, id mattis sem blandit at. Suspendisse tempus sodales enim nec aliquam. Vestibulum laoreet tincidunt dui, sit amet laoreet ipsum gravida at. 
    Nulla in tempus justo, et bibendum dolor.</p>
STR;

$dom = new DOMDocument();
@$dom->loadHTML($str);
$elements = $dom->getElementsByTagName('strong');

echo $elements->item(0)->nodeValue;
echo '<br>';
echo $elements->item(1)->nodeValue;

OUTPUTS:

Product Title
Product Heading 1

EDIT:

If I understand correctly, $str is populated by $_product->getShortDescription():

$dom = new DOMDocument();
@$dom->loadHTML($_product->getShortDescription());
$elements = $dom->getElementsByTagName('strong');

echo $elements->item(0)->nodeValue;
echo '<br>';
echo $elements->item(1)->nodeValue;

edited Dec 5, 2013 at 1:03

answered Dec 5, 2013 at 0:03

gwillie

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1 Comment

Kale Over a year ago

This looks interesting and maybe this is a stupid question, but given that the value of the description is pulled dynamically (via $_product->getShortDescription()) how would I incorporate the mark up you're recommending?

Casimir et Hippolyte · Accepted Answer · 2013-12-04 23:58:09Z

0

All you need is to use one of the patterns you have found and set the limit parameter of the preg_replace() function to 1. See the documentation.

answered Dec 4, 2013 at 23:58

Casimir et Hippolyte

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2 Comments

Kale Over a year ago

Doesn't setting the parameter limit to one mean that preg_replace stops after the first match?

Casimir et Hippolyte Over a year ago

@Kale: Yes. If you don't find a good pattern, you can use '~[^>]+>~'

brandonscript · Accepted Answer · 2013-12-05 00:02:53Z

0

You could simply use (.*)<\/strong> and then replace with <meta itemprop="description" content="$1">$1

Here's a working example: http://regex101.com/r/dV9wJ5

(I'm not sure if it's syntactically correct to your particular schema, but you get the idea).

answered Dec 5, 2013 at 0:02

brandonscript

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