PHP removing text from preg_match result

Question

Hello I am using preg_match to parse for data, it works 99% of the time but sometimes it gives me a result like:

$match[1] = <a href="example">text i want</a>

when what I really want is the "text i want" string. I am looping preg match and 99% of the time $match[1] gives me the text string i want but I want to implement something into the code like

if($match[1] is of the form <a href="example">blah blah</a>){
$match[1] = "blah blah" }

How would I go about achieving this? Thanks for reading.

Answer 1

If you're trying to get data between HTML tags, use an HTML parser. Regex is NOT the way to go when parsing HTML, because it's not always consistent enough for the regex matches to be reliable.

Answer 2

If you want to get the text inside the html tag, try the following code.

$string = '<a href="example">text i want</a>';
$string = strip_tags($string);
echo $string; //Outputs "text i want"