Say I have the following text
..(content).............
<A HREF="http://foo.com/content" >blah blah blah </A>
...(continue content)...
I want to delete the link and I want to delete the tag (while keeping the text in between). How do I do this with a regular expression (since the URLs will all be different)
Much thanks
This will remove all tags:
preg_replace("/<.*?>/", "", $string);
This will remove just the <a> tags:
preg_replace("/<\\/?a(\\s+.*?>|>)/", "", $string);
Avoid regular expressions whenever you can, especially when processing xml. In this case you can use strip_tags() or simplexml, depending on your string.
<?php
//example to extract the innerText from all anchors in a string
include('simple_html_dom.php');
$html = str_get_html('<A HREF="http://foo.com/content" >blah blah blah </A><A HREF="http://foo.com/content" >blah blah blah </A>');
//print the text of each anchor
foreach($html->find('a') as $e) {
echo $e->innerText;
}
?>
Not pretty but does the job:
$data = str_replace('</a>', '', $data);
$data = preg_replace('/<a[^>]+href[^>]+>/', '', $data);
strip_tag function and copying code samples here isn't necessary ;) This answer already contains function name and its link-reference.$pattern = '/href="([^"]*)"/';
I use this to replace the anchors with a text string...
function replaceAnchorsWithText($data) {
$regex = '/(<a\s*'; // Start of anchor tag
$regex .= '(.*?)\s*'; // Any attributes or spaces that may or may not exist
$regex .= 'href=[\'"]+?\s*(?P<link>\S+)\s*[\'"]+?'; // Grab the link
$regex .= '\s*(.*?)\s*>\s*'; // Any attributes or spaces that may or may not exist before closing tag
$regex .= '(?P<name>\S+)'; // Grab the name
$regex .= '\s*<\/a>)/i'; // Any number of spaces between the closing anchor tag (case insensitive)
if (is_array($data)) {
// This is what will replace the link (modify to you liking)
$data = "{$data['name']}({$data['link']})";
}
return preg_replace_callback($regex, array('self', 'replaceAnchorsWithText'), $data);
}
