Remove unnecessary li - php

Question

echo $nav gives code like this:
<ul>
<li class="someclass">sometext
<ul>
<li class="someclass">sometext</li>
<li class="spacer"></li>
<li class="someclass">sometext</li>
<li class="spacer"></li>
<li class="someclass">sometext</li>
<li class="spacer"></li>
<li class="someclass">sometext</li>
<li class="spacer"></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li class="spacer"></li>
<li class="someclass">sometext</li>
<li class="spacer"></li>
</ul>
There are list items with class spacer inside each child ul, after each normal list item.
How do I remove the spacer list items which are grandchildren of the main list, using PHP?
Example: <ul> <li> <ul> <li class="spacer">
I'm searching for a regular expression, which should erase <li class="spacer"></li> only in a child <ul> element.

Answer 1

If you don't have access to the $nav variable to remove it (which you likely do) then I'd just use CSS to hide it, something like this should work:
li ul li.spacer {
display:none;
}
If however you have access to $nav - delete that spacer li from the code. Simples.
Also, on a side note. having empty elements like that on the page as "spacers" is semantically bad. This should be handled via CSS, add margins/padding on other elements on the page, don't use a class of spacer, if you do then you may as well go back to using stray <br /> tags everywhere to create spaces.

Answer 2

$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($nav);
$spacers = $xml->xpath('li//li[#class="spacer"]');
foreach($spacers as $i => $n) {
unset($spacers[$i][0]);
}
echo $xml->asXML();
This is converting to XML (use a recent PHP 5.3 version and DOMDocument to export to HTML). Output:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<ul>
<li class="someclass">sometext
<ul>
<li class="someclass">sometext</li>
<li class="someclass">sometext</li>
<li class="someclass">sometext</li>
<li class="someclass">sometext</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li class="spacer"/>
<li class="someclass">sometext</li>
<li class="spacer"/>
</ul>

Answer 3

How about str_replace?
$nav = str_replace('<li class="spacer"></li>','',$nav);
edited code below
Based on the new requirement this code works. I know its hacky and sloppy but it works:
$temp = explode("\n",$nav);
for ($i=0;$i<count($temp);$i++) {
if (strstr($temp[$i],"<ul>")) {
$nested_ul = 1;
}
if (strstr($temp[$i],"</ul>")) {
$nested_ul = 0;
}
if ($nested_ul==0) {
if (!strstr($temp[$i],"spacer")) {
$new_nav .= $temp[$i]."\n";
}
} else {
$new_nav .= $temp[$i]."\n";
}
}
echo $new_nav;

Answer 4

"Easily" is relative. It depends on a few things. If you want, modify where the $nav is getting generated from.

Answer 5

use preg_replace to replace the li tags:
$new_nav = preg_replace('/<li class="spacer"></li>/', '', $nav);
echo $nav;

Answer 6

There are multiple ways:
Do not create it. It will be easier if you do not create something you do not want. It will be easier to maintain. So if you have any control over what is generated into $var string, just change it.
Simply replace it like that: str_replace('<li class="spacer"></li>', $var).
Use some HTML parser and remove the nodes.
Use JavaScript to remove <li class="spacer"></li> on client side.

Answer 7

Use substr_replace and strpos instead of str_replace, and specify an offset just after the first spacer.
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.substr-replace.php
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.strpos.php

Answer 8

Add the following CSS
ul ul li.spacer { display: none; }

Answer 9

Try this:
$nav = str_replace('<li class="spacer"></li>', '', $nav);