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Question

str_replace within certain html tags only

Answer 1

+1 A:

Do not treat the HTML document as a mere string. Like you already noticed, tags/elements (and how they are nested) have meaning in an HTML page and thus, you want to use a tool that knows what to make of an HTML document. This would be DOM then:

Here is an example. First some HTML to work with

$html = <<< HTML
<body>
    <h1>Germany reached the semi finals!!!</h1>
    <h2>Germany reached the semi finals!!!</h2>
    <h3>Germany reached the semi finals!!!</h3>
    <h4>Germany reached the semi finals!!!</h4>
    <h5>Germany reached the semi finals!!!</h5>
    <p>Fans in Germany are totally excited over their team's 4:0 win today</p>
</body>
HTML;

And here is the actual code you would need to make Argentina happy

$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadHTML($html);
$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);
$nodes = $xpath->query('//*[self::h1 or self::h2 or self::p]');
foreach( $nodes as $node ) {
    $node->nodeValue = str_replace('Germany', 'Argentina', $node->nodeValue);
}
echo $dom->saveHTML();

Just add the tags you want to replace content in the XPath query call. An alternative to using XPath would be to use DOMDocument::getElementsByTagName, which you might know from JavaScript:

 $nodes = $dom->getElementsByTagName('h1');

In fact, if you know it from JavaScript, you might know a lot more of it, because DOM is actually a language agnostic API defined by the W3C and implemented in many languages. The advantage of XPath over getElementsByTagName is obviously that you can query multiple nodes in one go. The drawback is, you have to know XPath :)

Gordon 2010-07-03 19:05:08

Epic answer, thanks for your help. If you're ever in London i'll buy you a guinness!

DrShamoon 2010-07-03 19:11:48

@DrShamoon You're welcome. I'll buy you the second then for compensating Germany having thrown out the English team as well ;)

Gordon 2010-07-03 19:13:19

We don't like to talk about that :@( haha thanks again mate.

DrShamoon 2010-07-03 19:18:13

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str_replace within certain html tags only

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