PHP - How to replace a phrase with another?

Question

How can i replace this <p><span class="headline"> with this <p class="headline"><span> easiest with PHP.

$data = file_get_contents("http://www.ihr-apotheker.de/cs1.html");
$clean1 = strstr($data, '<p>');
$str = preg_replace('#(<a.*>).*?(</a>)#', '$1$2', $clean1);
$ausgabe = strip_tags($str, '<p>');
echo $ausgabe;

Before I alter the html from the site I want to get the class declaration from the span to the <p> tag.

Thx for help!

Answer 1

dont parse html with regex! this class should provide what you need http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net/

Answer 2

Have you tried using str_replace? If the placement of the p and span tags are consistent, you can simply replace one for the other with str_replace("replacement","part to replace", $string)

Answer 3

The reason not to parse HTML with regex is if you can't guarantee the format. If you already know the format of the string, you don't have to worry about having a complete parser.

In your case, if you know that's the format, you can use str_replace

str_replace('<p><span class="headline">', '<p class="headline"><span>', $data);

Answer 4

Well, answer was accepted already, but anyway, here is how to do it with native DOM:

$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadHTMLFile("http://www.ihr-apotheker.de/cs1.html");

// remove links but keep link text
$links = $dom->getElementsByTagName('a');
foreach($links as $link) {
    $link->parentNode->replaceChild(
        $dom->createTextNode($link->nodeValue), $link);
}

// switch classes
$xPath = new DOMXpath($dom);
foreach($xPath->query('//p/span[@class="headline"]') as $node) {
    $node->removeAttribute('class');
    $node->parentNode->setAttribute('class', 'headline');
}
echo $dom->saveHTML();

On a sidenote, HTML has elements for headings, so why not use a <h*> element instead of using the semantically superfluous "headline" class.