Using preg_replace

Question

How would I replace all span tags (and whatevers inside them) that have the class pagenum pncolor with an empty line. str_replace wouldn't work because the name is different for all of them, so I assume I'd use preg_replace, but I'm sure how that works.

<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_001' name='page_001'></a>001</span>
<p>Some text</p>

<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_130' name='page_130'></a>130</span>
<p>Some text</p>
<p>Some text</p>
<p>Some text</p>

<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_120' name='page_120'></a>120</span>
<p>Some text</p>

<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_100' name='page_100'></a>100</span>
<p>Some text</p>

Note that while if this is a single case, a regex could probably work, for more general usage you might want to use an HTML parser instead of regex, and then something like XPath to quickly pull out exactly the items you want. — Amber
– Amber, Commented Mar 9, 2010 at 22:35
possible duplicate of How to parse and process HTML with PHP? — PeeHaa
– PeeHaa, Commented Jan 16, 2012 at 19:59

Crozin · Accepted Answer · 2010-03-09 22:28:32Z

2

Use this regexp: #<span class='pagenum pncolor'>.*?</span>#si

answered Mar 9, 2010 at 22:28

Crozin

44.5k13 gold badges92 silver badges136 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

Comments

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 11:47:38Z

1

I'm going to mention the obligatory: You can't parse [X]HTML with regex. Because HTML can't be parsed by regex. Regex is not a tool that can be used to correctly parse HTML.

However, I'm guilty of using regexes in situations like this also... And if I were to do so, I'd use @andreas's answer.

edited May 23, 2017 at 11:47

CommunityBot

11 silver badge

answered Mar 9, 2010 at 22:37

Josh

11.1k11 gold badges67 silver badges112 bronze badges

Comments

Andreas · Accepted Answer · 2010-03-09 22:35:18Z

0

assuming that $text = {THE_HTML_STRING_YOU_POSTED_IN_YOUR_QUESTION};

you can try:

preg_replace("/<span class='pagenum pncolor'>(.*)<\/span>/",'',$text);

answered Mar 9, 2010 at 22:35

Andreas

5,3614 gold badges46 silver badges64 bronze badges

2 Comments

Chad Birch Over a year ago

That would replace everything between the first <span> to the last </span>. Put a ? after your * to fix that.

Andreas Over a year ago

You are right! Making the quantifier LAZY will solve the problem Please check regular-expressions.info/repeat.html that states that laziness will result in more CPU cycles due to backtracking.

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

Using preg_replace

3 Answers 3

Comments

Comments

2 Comments

Your Answer

Linked

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

3 Answers 3

Comments

Comments

2 Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Linked

Related