preg_replace href anchor with anchor text - php

Question

how can i replace all the anchors with each anchor text . my code is
$body='<p>The man was dancing like a little boy while all kids were watching ... </p>';
i want the result to be :
<p>The man was dancing like a little boy while all kids were watching ... </p>
i used :
$body= preg_replace('#<a href="https?://(?:.+\.)?ok.co.*?>.*?</a>#i', '$1', $body);
and result is :
<p>The man was while all kids were watching ... </p>

Answer 1

Try this
$body='<p>The man was dancing like a little boy while all kids were watching ... </p>';
echo preg_replace('#<a.*?>([^>]*)</a>#i', '$1', $body);

Answer 2

Without regexes.....
<?php
$d = new DOMDocument();
$d->loadHTML('<p>The man was dancing like a little boy while all kids were watching ... </p>');
$x = new DOMXPath($d);
foreach($x->query('//a') as $anchor){
$url = $anchor->getAttribute('href');
$domain = parse_url($url,PHP_URL_HOST);
if($domain == 'www.example.com'){
$anchor->parentNode->replaceChild(new DOMText($anchor->textContent),$anchor);
}
}
function get_inner_html( $node ) {
$innerHTML= '';
$children = $node->childNodes;
foreach ($children as $child) {
$innerHTML .= $child->ownerDocument->saveXML( $child );
}
return $innerHTML;
}
echo get_inner_html($x->query('//body')[0]);

Answer 3

can use this code:
regex : /< a.*?>|<a.*?>|<\/a>/g
$body='<p>The man was dancing like a little boy while all kids were watching ... </p>';
echo preg_replace('/< a.*?>|<a.*?>|<\/a>/', ' ', $body);
test and show example match word: https://regex101.com/r/mgYjoB/1

Answer 4

You could simply use strip_tags() and htmlspecialchars() here.
strip_tags - Strip HTML and PHP tags from a string
htmlspecialchars - Convert special characters to HTML entities
Step 1: Use strip_tags() to strip all tags except the <p> tag.
Step 2: Since we need to obtain the string along with the HTML tags, we need to use htmlspecialchars().
echo htmlspecialchars(strip_tags($body, '<p>'));
When there's already an in-built PHP function, I think it's better and more compact to use that instead of using preg_replace