Remove the closing </ span> from the expression contains more than one - php

Question

There is a very large piece of code that does not work out well when specific syntax html.
There is an expression:
<span class="*0">
<span class="*1">TEXT</span>
...
<span class="*2">TEXT</span>
</span>
There is a regular expression:
$mstr = '#<span class="0">(.*?)</span>#';
What is needed:
Cut the upper span (<span class = "* 0">) with the correct closing tag.
My regular cuts out the first in a row :(

Answer 1

Here is a solution. I don't know if it fits your needs, but it does the job. It simply looks for all the starting tags and closing tags, stores their substring positions and pairs them. Then it removes the tag with the class you need.
One note: if a tag is not propperly closed, this could fail. So I would suggest you build in some safety measures.
$start_pos=stripos($var,'<span class="*0">');
$len=strlen($var);
$str_len=strlen('<span class="*0">');
$offset=0;
do{
$p=stripos($var,'<span',$offset);
if($p===false){break;}
$open_pos[]=$p;
$offset=$p+1;
}while($offset<$len);
$offset=0;
do{
$p=stripos($var,'</span>',$offset);
if($p===false){break;}
$close_pos[]=$p;
$offset=$p+1;
}while($offset<$len);
$t=0;
do{
$change=false;
for($i=0;$i<count($open_pos)-1;$i++){
foreach($close_pos as $k=>$v){
if($open_pos[$i+1]>$v){
if($open_pos[$i]==$start_pos){
$end_pos=$v;
break 3;
}
unset($open_pos[$i],$close_pos[$k]);
$open_pos=array_values($open_pos);
$close_pos=array_values($close_pos);
$change=true;
break 2;
}
}
}
if($open_pos[$i]!=$start_pos){
unset($open_pos[$i],$close_pos[0]);
$open_pos=array_values($open_pos);
$close_pos=array_values($close_pos);
$change=true;
}
else{
$end_pos=$close_pos[0];
break 3;
}
if(count($open_pos)<2)break;
$t++;
}while($t<1000);
$var=substr_replace($var,'###',$end_pos,7);
$var=substr_replace($var,'###',$start_pos,$str_len);
echo $var;
Tested on this beautiful HTML:
$var='<span class="*A">a
<span class="*B">b
<span class="*E">e</span>
<span class="*C">c
<span class="*D">d
<span class="*E">e</span>
<span class="*0">BEFORE THIS ONE
<span class="*F">a</span>
<span class="*G">g
<span class="*H">h
<span class="*J">j</span>
</span>
<span class="*K">k</span>
<span class="*L">l</span>
<span class="*M">m</span>
_GGG</span>
<span class="*N">n</span>
BETWEEN</span>BETWEEN
<span class="*O">o
<span class="*P">p</span>
_OOO</span>
</span>
_CCC</span>
<span class="*Q">q
<span class="*R">r</span>
_RRR</span>
</span>
</span>
';