PHP - Delete content between two string sequences or tags

Question

I am looking for a way to delete part of a string from an xml file. At the moment i have some content like so:

<description>blah blah blah blah</description>

I would like to use a function to find

<description> & </description>

and delete the content between. It would also need to repeat this throughout the xml document to remove any content between further description tags.

Im not sure how to start at attempting this and any sample code would be much appreciated.

preg_replace might help. Eg: $xml = preg_replace("~(<description>).*?(<description>)~msi", "$1$2", $original_xml); — Sjaak Trekhaak
– Sjaak Trekhaak, Commented Feb 1, 2012 at 11:06
how to parse html/xml has been answered before. can you please be more specific about your scenario. are there literal ampersands in your code and you need to fix them? — Gordon
– Gordon, Commented Feb 1, 2012 at 11:16

gou1 · Accepted Answer · 2012-02-01 13:52:07Z

1

If your document is fully XML, you can use the DOMDocument extension to manipulate it. See especially http://www.php.net/manual/en/domdocument.getelementsbytagname.php You could write something like:

$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadXML(' YOUR XML CODE HERE ');
$descriptions = $dom->getElementsByTagName('description');
foreach ($descriptions as $description) {
   $description->nodeValue = '';
}
$xml = $dom->saveXML();

edited Feb 1, 2012 at 13:52

answered Feb 1, 2012 at 11:20

gou1

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2 Comments

Gordon Over a year ago

this doesnt explain how to get the elements containing an ampersand. also, if there is literal ampersands in the XML, the OP likely cannot open the document with DOM because ampersands denote entities.

gou1 Over a year ago

He said "to remove any content between further description tags." so I assumed the ampersand was just a placeholder. Obivously a small test is needed in the foreach loop if he only wants to remove when nodeValue is " & ". As for the litteral ampersand, it is true, hence "If your document is fully XML".

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