PHP regular expression to remove tags in HTML document

Question

Say I have the following text

..(content).............
<A HREF="http://foo.com/content" >blah blah blah </A>
...(continue content)...

I want to delete the link and I want to delete the tag (while keeping the text in between). How do I do this with a regular expression (since the URLs will all be different)

Much thanks

Answer 1

use str_replace

Answer 2

Not pretty but does the job:

$data = str_replace('</a>', '', $data);
$data = preg_replace('/<a[^>]+href[^>]+>/', '', $data);

Answer 3

This will remove all tags:

preg_replace("/<.*?>/", "", $string);

This will remove just the <a> tags:

preg_replace("/<\\/?a(\\s+.*?>|>)/", "", $string);

Answer 4

Avoid regular expressions whenever you can, especially when processing xml. In this case you can use strip_tags() or simplexml, depending on your string.

Answer 5

<?php
//example to extract the innerText from all anchors in a string
include('simple_html_dom.php');

$html = str_get_html('<A HREF="http://foo.com/content" >blah blah blah </A><A HREF="http://foo.com/content" >blah blah blah </A>');

//print the text of each anchor    
foreach($html->find('a') as $e) {
    echo $e->innerText;
}
?>

See PHP Simple DOM Parser.