PHP - Strings - Remove a HTML tag with a specific class, including its contents

Question

I have a string like this:

<div class="container">
  <h3 class="hdr"> Text </h3>
  <div class="main">
    text
    <h3> text... </h3>
    ....

  </div>
</div>

how do I remove the H3 tag with the .hdr class using as little code as possible ?

Answer 1

Using as little code as possible? Shortest code isn't necessarily best. However, if your HTML h3 tag always looks like that, this should suffice:

$html = preg_replace('#<h3 class="hdr">(.*?)</h3>#', '', $html);

Generally speaking, using regex for parsing HTML isn't a particularly good idea though.

Answer 2

Something like this is what you're looking for...

$output = preg_replace("#<h3 class=\"hdr\">(.*?)</h3>#is", "", $input);

Use "is" at the end of the regex because it will cause it to be case insensitive which is more flexible.

Answer 3

try a preg_match, then a preg_replace on the following pattern:

/(<h3
[\s]+
[^>]*?
class=[\"\'][^\"\']*?hdr[^\"\']*?[\"\']
[^>]*?>
[\s\S\d\D\w\W]*?
<\/h3>)/i

It's messy, and it should work fine only if the h3 tag doesn't have inline javascript which might contain sequences that this regular expression will react to. It is far from perfect, but in simple cases where h3 tag is used it should work.

Haven't tried it though, might need adjustments.

Another way would be to copy that function, use your copy, without the h3, if it's possible.