How to remove a text from a variable? (php)

Question

I have a variable $link_item, it's used with echo and gives the strings like

<span class="name">Google</span>http://google.com

How to remove "<span class="name">Google</span>" from string?

It should give just "http://google.com".

Heard it can be done with regex(), please help.

Answer 1

Without regex:

echo substr($link_item, stripos($link_item, 'http:'))

But this only works if the first part (i.e. <span class="name">Google</span>) never contains http:. If you can assure this: here you go :)

Reference: substr, stripos

Update:

As @Gordon points out in his comment, my code is doing the same as strstr() already does. I just put it here in case one does not read the comments:

echo strstr($link_item, 'http://');

Answer 2

Don't use a regex. Use a HTML parser to extract only the text you want from it.

Answer 3

Solved:

$contents = '<span class="name">Google</span>http://google.com';
$new_text = preg_replace('/<span[^>]*>([\s\S]*?)<\/span[^>]*>/', '', $contents);
echo $new_text;

// outputs -> http://google.com

Answer 4

$string = '<span class="name">Google</span>http://google.com';
$pieces = explode("</span>",$string);
//In case there is more than one span before the URL
echo $pieces[count($pieces) -1];

Answer 5

Made myself

$link_item_url = preg_replace('@<span[^>]*?>.*?</span>@si', '', $link_item);

This will remove any <span + something + </span> from variable $link_item.

Thanks for all.