How do i form this replacement with regular expression - php

Question

I need to remove a particular string using php, the string needs to start with <div class='event'> followed by any possible string but which contains $myVariable, which is then followed by </div>. How do I remove all this using preg_replace()? I have worked out it might be something like this
preg_replace("<div class='event'>(.*)" . $myVariable . "(.*)</div>", "", $content);
But I cant get it to work.
Update:
I need to remove a div and everything inside it, the div contains an event name and date but I can only delete the div based on the events name and so the date needs to be defined as practically any string.

Answer 1

Let's imagine you have a <div> and inside it, there is some text node with a specific word you define with $myVariable.
The task is:
Read the document in
Initialize DOM
Collect the <div> tags with .nodeValue containing $myVariable text
Remove those tags from the DOM
Return updated DOM
The code for that algorithm is below (DOM is initialized with a HTML string in the demo):
$html = "<<YOUR_HTML_STRING>>"
$dom = new DOMDocument; // Declaring the DOM
$dom->loadHTML($html); // Initializing the DOM with an HTML string
$myVariable = "2015-09-12"; // Your dynamic variable
$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom); // Initializing the DOMXpath
$divs = $xpath->query("//div[contains(.,'$myVariable')]"); // Collecting DIVs
// having $myVariable
foreach($divs as $div) {
$div->parentNode->removeChild($div); // Removing the DIVs
}
echo $dom->saveHTML(); // Getting the updated DOM
See IDEONE demo
Note that you can force DOMDocument to omit adding !DOCTYPE using the following to declare and initialize DOM:
$dom = new DOMDocument('1.0', 'UTF-8');
$dom->loadHTML($html, LIBXML_HTML_NOIMPLIED | LIBXML_HTML_NODEFDTD);