PHP - Extracting text from HTML

Question

I have a long string of HTML that contains

<p>
<img>
<span> 

and a bunch of other tags.

Is there anyway of extracting ONLY the text within the tags from this string?

Answer 1

If you want to extract all text within any tags, the simple way is to strip the tags: strip_tags()

If you want to remove specific tags, maybe this SO questions helps.

Answer 2

I know I'll be getting a lot of bashing for this, but for a simple task like this I'd use regular expressions.

preg_match_all('~(<span>(.*?)</span>)~', $html, $matches);

$matches[0] will contain all the span tags and their contents, $matches[1] contains only the contents.

For more complicated stuff you might want to take a look at PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser or similar:

// Create DOM from URL or file
$html = str_get_html($html);

// Find all images
foreach($html->find('img') as $element) {
   echo $element->src . '<br>';
}

Etc.

Answer 3

Regular Expression is the only solution i can think of.

You will find your answer here http://www.catswhocode.com/blog/15-php-regular-expressions-for-web-developers