Find phrases/words between HTML using PHP

Question

Hey all!

I was wondering of a solid way to find phrases/words that are part of an HTML document. For example if I have the following document:

<a href="#">This is a test</a><b>Another test</b>

My goal is to find "This is a test" and "Another test" and replace it with something else. Note that these are sample phrases and it could contain numbers or the ampersand symbol.

Any help would be great.

Thank you

Answer 1

you could use php's strip_tags($string, $tagsToRemove)

$justText = strip_tags('<a href="#">This is a test</a><b>Another test</b>');

And then you'd have the text, so you could use str_replace("new text", $justText);

You might have to break it up using the second parameter of strip_tags() to keep the tags seperate, though.

$html = '<a href="#">This is a test</a><b>Another test</b>';
$anchorText = strip_tags($html, '<a>');
$paraText = strip_tags($html, '<p>');
$html = str_replace("new anchor text", $anchorText);
$html = str_replace("new paragraph text", $paraText);

Answer 2

Consider your HTML as XML and use the DOM (PHP 5) or DOM XML (PHP 4) extension (or any other XML extension included in PHP).

For each node, you can get the inside text using DomNode.GetValue (depending on what library you use).

Answer 3

I would look into something like str_replace()

Answer 4

Here is explained how to remove all html stuff (html tags, scripts, css) and then with str_replace you can replace whatever you want.

Answer 5

If this is an option to do client side I would suggest jQuery replaceWith()

Answer 6

The key here is to use a regular expression to, in a sense, parse the HTML...

So you'd use:

<?php

$str = "<a href =\"\">Hello</a>"; //The string to search

preg_match('/(<.+>)??.+(<\/.+>)??/i',$str,$match); //Find all occurences and store the tag content in an array called $match

echo $match[0]; //Echo the first value

?>

This basically searches the input string (which you'd set as your page's HTML) and returns each match of text between the tags as a value in the array. For for the first tag, the value would be stored in $match[0], the second in $match[1], etc.

It does this by first finding a pattern that starts with an HTML tag and ends with an HTML tag, but not selecting either tag, leaving only the content in between selected.

Hope this helps!

Braeden