PHP remove all html but comments

Question

How would I remove all of a an html input but comments? For example: This <html><body><p>hello</p></body></html> Would turn into this: This 

How would I do this? Thanks!

Edit: I know you can do stuff like this with regular expressions, But I don't know how.

meze · Accepted Answer · 2011-03-18 03:30:07Z

1

Instead of replacing HTML, I'd extract all comments using:

preg_match_all('#(<!--.*?-->)#s', '<html><body><!-- hello paragraph --><p>hello</p></body></html>', $m);

answered Mar 18, 2011 at 3:30

meze

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1 Comment

thomasrutter Over a year ago

I believe ths approach would be more robust than trying to identify non-comments. It also wouldn't have the drawback that HTML tags inside comments would be mungled or removed.

mario · Accepted Answer · 2011-03-18 03:26:03Z

0

That's indeed a bit more complex, but doable with regular expressions:

$text = preg_replace('~<(?!!--)/?\w[^>]*(?<!--)>~', "", $text);

This works on your example, but can fail for others. Amusingly it also removes HTML tags from within comments.

$regex = '~
    <             # opening html bracket
    (?!!--)       # negative assertion, no "!--" may follow
    /?\w          # tags must start with letter or optional /
    [^>]*         # matches html tag innards
    (?<!--)       # lookbehind assertion, no "--" before closing >
    >             # closing bracket
 ~x'

answered Mar 18, 2011 at 3:26

mario

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Comments

user557846 · Accepted Answer · 2011-03-18 03:28:59Z

0

$foo="<html><body><!-- hello paragraph --><p>hello</p></body></html>";
preg_match('/(\<|<)!--(\s*.*?\s*)--(\>|>)/m',$foo,$result);
print_r($result);

answered Mar 18, 2011 at 3:28

user557846

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