Find Links and Remove them from HTML

Question

Hi,

How can I look for links in HTML and remove them?

$html = '<p><a href="javascript:doThis('Test Title 1')">Test Title 1</a></p>';
$html .= '<p><a href="javascript:doThis('Test Title 2')">Test Title 2</a></p>';
$html .= '<p><a href="javascript:doThis('Test Title 3')">Test Title 3</a></p>';

$match = '<a href="javascript:doThis('Test Title 2')">';

I want to remove the anchor but display the text. see below.

Test Title 1

Test Title 2

Test Title 3

I've never used Regular Expressions before, but maybe i can avoid it also. Let me know if im not clear.

Thanks

Mark

EDIT: its not a client side thing. I cant use javascript for this. I have a custom CMS and want to edit HTML stored in a Database.

Answer 1

You may try the simplest thing:

echo strip_tags($html, '<p>');

This strips all tags except <p>

If you really like regexp:

echo preg_replace('=</?a(\s[^>]*)?>=ims', '', $html);

EDIT:

Delete a - tag AND surrounding tags (code gets messy and doesn't work with broken (X)HTML):

echo preg_replace('=<([a-z]+)[^>]*>\s*<a(\s[^>]*)?>(.*?)</a>\s*</\\1>=ims', '$3', $html);

Howerwer if your problem is that complicated, I recommend that you try xpath.

Answer 2

You might have some joy with Beautiful Soup - http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/ (phython html parsing / maniuplation API)

Answer 3

sed -i -e 's/<a.*<\/a>//g' filename.html

Note that using regular expressions for hacking HTML is a... dubious proposition, but it might just work in practice ;-)

Answer 4

You could see if Simple HTML DOM does the trick.