PHP PREG Question

Answer 1

Step one: Remove regular expressions from your toolbox when dealing with HTML. You need a parser.

Step two: Download simple_html_dom for php.

Step three: Parse

$html = str_get_html('<SPAN class=placeholder title="" jQuery1262031390171="46">[[[SOMETEXT]]]</SPAN>');
$spanText = $html->find('span', 1)->innerText;

Step four: Profit!

Edit

$html->find('span.placeholder', 1)->tag, $matches); will return what you want. It looks for class=placeholder.

Answer 2

I think this should solve your poble

function strip_placeholder_spans( $in_text ) {
preg_match("/>(.*?)<\//", $in_text, $result);
return $result[1]; }

Answer 3

Use an HTML parse. This is the most robust solution. The following code will work for the two code examples you posted:

$s= <<<STR
<span style="" class="placeholder" title="">[[[SOMETEXT]]</span>
Some Other text &amp; <b>Html</b>
<SPAN class=placeholder title="" jQuery1262031390171="46">[[[SOMETEXT]]]</SPAN>
STR;

preg_match_all('/\<span[^>]+?class="*placeholder"*[^>]+?>([^<]+)?<\/span>/isU', $s, $m);
var_dump($m);

Using regular expressions results in very focused code. This example will only handle very specific HTML and well-formed HTML. For instance, it won't parse <span class="placeholder">some text < more text</span>. If you have control over the source HTML this may be good enough.