I have the following that I need removed from string in loop.
<comment>Some comment here</comment>
The result is from a database so the the content inside the comment tag is different.
Thanks for the help.
Figured it out. The following seems to do the trick.
echo preg_replace('~\<comment>.*?\</comment>~', '', $blog->comment);
This may be overkill, but you can use DOMDocument to parse the string as HTML, then remove the tags.
$str = 'Test 123 <comment>Some comment here</comment> abc 456';
$dom = new DOMDocument;
// Wrap $str in a div, so we can easily extract the HTML from the DOMDocument
#$dom->loadHTML("<div id='string'>$str</div>"); // It yells about <comment> not being valid
$comments = $dom->getElementsByTagName('comment');
foreach($comments as $c){
$c->parentNode->removeChild($c);
}
$domXPath = new DOMXPath($dom);
// $dom->getElementById requires the HTML be valid, and it's not here
// $dom->saveHTML() adds a DOCTYPE and HTML tag, which we don't need
echo $domXPath->query('//div[#id="string"]')->item(0)->nodeValue; // "Test 123 abc 456"
DEMO: http://codepad.org/wfzsmpAW
If this is only a matter of removing the <comment /> tag, a simple preg_replace() or a str_replace() will do:
$input = "<comment>Some comment here</comment>";
// Probably the best method str_replace()
echo str_replace(array("<comment>","</comment>"), "", $input);
// some comment here
// Or by regular expression...
echo preg_replace("/<\/?comment>/", "", $input);
// some comment here
Or if there are other tags in there and you want to strip out all but a few, use strip_tags() with its optional second parameter to specify allowable tags.
echo strip_tags($input, "<a><p><other_allowed_tag>");
Related
I have code with several lines like this
<p> <inset></p>
Where there may be any number of spaces or tabs (or none) between the opening <p> tag and the rest if the string. I need to replace these, but I can't get it to work.
I thought this would do it, but it doesn't work:
<p>[ \t]+<inset></p>
Try this:
$html = preg_replace('#(<p>)\s+(<inset></p>)#', '$1$2', $html);
If you want true text-trimming for HTML including everything you can encounter like those entitites, comments, child-elements and all that stuff, you can make use of a TextRangeTrimmer and TextRange:
$htmlFragment = '<p> <inset></p>';
$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadHTML($htmlFragment);
$parent = $dom->getElementsByTagName('body')->item(0);
if (!$parent)
{
throw new Exception('Parent element not found.');
}
$range = new TextRange($parent);
$trimmer = new TextRangeTrimmer($range);
$trimmer->ltrim();
// inner HTML (PHP >= 5.3.6)
foreach($parent->childNodes as $node)
{
echo $dom->saveHTML($node);
}
Output:
<p><inset></p>
I've both classes in a gist: https://gist.github.com/1894360/ (codepad viper is down).
See as well the related questions / answers:
Wordwrap / Cut Text in HTML string
Ignore html tags in preg_replace
Try to load your HTML string into a DOM tree instead, and then trim all the text values in the tree.
http://php.net/domdocument.loadhtml
http://php.net/trim
I need to find and replace all text matches in a case insensitive way, unless the text is within an anchor tag - for example:
<p>Match this text and replace it</p>
<p>Don't match this text</p>
<p>We still need to match this text and replace it</p>
Searching for 'match this text' would only replace the first instance and last instance.
[Edit] As per Gordon's comment, it may be preferred to use DOMDocument in this instance. I'm not at all familiar with the DOMDocument extension, and would really appreciate some basic examples for this functionality.
Here is an UTF-8 safe solution, which not only works with properly formatted documents, but also with document fragments.
The mb_convert_encoding is needed, because loadHtml() seems to has a bug with UTF-8 encoding (see here and here).
The mb_substr is trimming the body tag from the output, this way you get back your original content without any additional markup.
<?php
$html = '<p>Match this text and replace it</p>
<p>Don\'t match this text</p>
<p>We still need to match this text and replace itŐŰ</p>
<p>This is a link <span>with <strong>don\'t match this text</strong> content</span></p>';
$dom = new DOMDocument();
// loadXml needs properly formatted documents, so it's better to use loadHtml, but it needs a hack to properly handle UTF-8 encoding
$dom->loadHtml(mb_convert_encoding($html, 'HTML-ENTITIES', "UTF-8"));
$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);
foreach($xpath->query('//text()[not(ancestor::a)]') as $node)
{
$replaced = str_ireplace('match this text', 'MATCH', $node->wholeText);
$newNode = $dom->createDocumentFragment();
$newNode->appendXML($replaced);
$node->parentNode->replaceChild($newNode, $node);
}
// get only the body tag with its contents, then trim the body tag itself to get only the original content
echo mb_substr($dom->saveXML($xpath->query('//body')->item(0)), 6, -7, "UTF-8");
References:
1. find and replace keywords by hyperlinks in an html fragment, via php dom
2. Regex / DOMDocument - match and replace text not in a link
3. php problem with russian language
4. Why Does DOM Change Encoding?
I read dozens of answers in the subject, so I am sorry if I forgot somebody (please comment it and I will add yours as well in this case).
Thanks for Gordon and stillstanding for commenting on my other answer.
Try this one:
$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadHTML($html_content);
function preg_replace_dom($regex, $replacement, DOMNode $dom, array $excludeParents = array()) {
if (!empty($dom->childNodes)) {
foreach ($dom->childNodes as $node) {
if ($node instanceof DOMText &&
!in_array($node->parentNode->nodeName, $excludeParents))
{
$node->nodeValue = preg_replace($regex, $replacement, $node->nodeValue);
}
else
{
preg_replace_dom($regex, $replacement, $node, $excludeParents);
}
}
}
}
preg_replace_dom('/match this text/i', 'IT WORKS', $dom->documentElement, array('a'));
This is the stackless non-recursive approach using pre-order traversal of the DOM tree.
libxml_use_internal_errors(TRUE);
$dom=new DOMDocument('1.0','UTF-8');
$dom->substituteEntities=FALSE;
$dom->recover=TRUE;
$dom->strictErrorChecking=FALSE;
$dom->loadHTMLFile($file);
$root=$dom->documentElement;
$node=$root;
$flag=FALSE;
for (;;) {
if (!$flag) {
if ($node->nodeType==XML_TEXT_NODE &&
$node->parentNode->tagName!='a') {
$node->nodeValue=preg_replace(
'/match this text/is',
$replacement, $node->nodeValue
);
}
if ($node->firstChild) {
$node=$node->firstChild;
continue;
}
}
if ($node->isSameNode($root)) break;
if ($flag=$node->nextSibling)
$node=$node->nextSibling;
else
$node=$node->parentNode;
}
echo $dom->saveHTML();
libxml_use_internal_errors(TRUE); and the 3 lines of code after $dom=new DOMDocument; should be able to handle any malformed HTML.
$a='<p>Match this text and replace it</p>
<p>Don\'t match this text</p>
<p>We still need to match this text and replace it</p>';
echo preg_replace('~match this text(?![^<]*</a>)~i','replacement',$a);
The negative lookahead ensures the replacement happens only if the next tag is not a closing link . It works fine with your example, though it won't work if you happen to use other tags inside your links.
You can use PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser. It is similar to DOMDocument, but in my opinion it's simpler to use.
Here is the alternative in parallel with Netcoder's DomDocument solution:
function replaceWithSimpleHtmlDom($html_content, $search, $replace, $excludedParents = array()) {
require_once('simple_html_dom.php');
$html = str_get_html($html_content);
foreach ($html->find('text') as $element) {
if (!in_array($element->parent()->tag, $excludedParents))
$element->innertext = str_ireplace($search, $replace, $element->innertext);
}
return (string)$html;
}
I have just profiled this code against my DomDocument solution (witch prints the exact same output), and the DomDocument is (not surprisingly) way faster (~4ms against ~77ms).
<?php
$a = '<p>Match this text and replace it</p>
<p>Don\'t match this text</p>
<p>We still need to match this text and replace it</p>
';
$res = preg_replace("#[^<a.*>]match this text#",'replacement',$a);
echo $res;
?>
This way works. Hope you want realy case sensitive, so match with small letter.
HTML parsing with regexs is a huge challenge, and they can very easily end up getting too complex and taking up loads of memory. I would say the best way is to do this:
preg_replace('/match this text/i','replacement text');
preg_replace('/(<a[^>]*>[^(<\/a)]*)replacement text(.*?<\/a)/is',"$1match this text$3");
If your replacement text is something which might occur otherwise, you might want to add an intermediate step with some unique identifier.
I need to convert
$text = 'We had <i>fun</i>. Look at this photo of Joe';
[Edit] There could be multiple links in the text.
to
$text = 'We had fun. Look at this photo (http://example.com) of Joe';
All HTML tags are to be removed and the href value from <a> tags needs to be added like above.
What would be an efficient way to solve this with regex? Any code snippet would be great.
First do a preg_replace to keep the link. You could use:
preg_replace('(.*?)', '$\2 ($\1)', $str);
Then use strip_tags which will finish off the rest of the tags.
try an xml parser to replace any tag with it's inner html and the a tags with its href attribute.
http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.domxml.php
The DOM solution:
$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadHTML($html);
$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);
foreach($xpath->query('//a[#href]') as $node) {
$textNode = new DOMText(sprintf('%s (%s)',
$node->nodeValue, $node->getAttribute('href')));
$node->parentNode->replaceChild($textNode, $node);
}
echo strip_tags($dom->saveHTML());
and the same without XPath:
$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadHTML($html);
foreach($dom->getElementsByTagName('a') as $node) {
if($node->hasAttribute('href')) {
$textNode = new DOMText(sprintf('%s (%s)',
$node->nodeValue, $node->getAttribute('href')));
$node->parentNode->replaceChild($textNode, $node);
}
}
echo strip_tags($dom->saveHTML());
All it does is load any HTML into a DomDocument instance. In the first case it uses an XPath expression, which is kinda like SQL for XML, and gets all links with an href attribute. It then creates a text node element from the innerHTML and the href attribute and replaces the link. The second version just uses the DOM API and no Xpath.
Yes, it's a few lines more than Regex but this is clean and easy to understand and it won't give you any headaches when you need to add additional logic.
I've done things like this using variations of substring and replace. I'd probably use regex today but you wanted an alternative so:
For the <i> tags, I'd do something like:
$text = replace($text, "<i>", "");
$text = replace($text, "</i>", "");
(My php is really rusty, so replace may not be the right function name -- but the idea is what I'm sharing.)
The <a> tag is a bit more tricky. But, it can be done. You need to find the point that <a starts and that the > ends with. Then you extract the entire length and replace the closing </a>
That might go something like:
$start = strrpos( $text, "<a" );
$end = strrpos( $text, "</a>", $start );
$text = substr( $text, $start, $end );
$text = replace($text, "</a>", "");
(I don't know if this will work, again the idea is what I want to communicate. I hope the code fragments help but they probably don't work "out of the box". There are also a lot of possible bugs in the code snippets depending on your exact implementation and environment)
Reference:
strrpos - http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.strrpos.php
replace - http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.str-replace.php
substr - http://php.net/manual/en/function.substr.php
It's also very easy to do with a parser:
# available from http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net
include('simple_html_dom.php');
# parse and echo
$html = str_get_html('We had <i>fun</i>. Look at this photo of Joe');
$a = $html->find('a');
$a[0]->outertext = "{$a[0]->innertext} ( {$a[0]->href} )";
echo strip_tags($html);
And that produces the code you want in your test case.
Ok I have to parse out a SOAP request and in the request some of the values are passed with (or inside) a Anchor tag. Looking for a RegEx (or alt method) to strip the tag and just return the value.
// But item needs to be a RegEx of some sort, it's a field right now
if($sObject->list == 'item') {
// Split on > this should be the end of the right side of the anchor tag
$pieces = explode(">", $sObject->fields->$field);
// Split on < this should be the closing anchor tag
$piece = explode("<", $pieces[1]);
$fields_string .= $piece[0] . "\n";
}
item is a field name but I would like to make this a RegEx to check for the Anchor tag instead of a specific field.
PHP has a strip_tags() function.
Alternatively you can use filter_var() with FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING.
Whatever you do don't parse HTML/XML with regular expressions. It's really error-prone and flaky. PHP has at least 3 different parsers as standard (SimpleXML, DOMDocument and XMLReader spring to mind).
I agree with cletus, using RegEx on HTML is bad practice because of how loose HTML is as a language (and I moan about PHP being too loose...). There are just so many ways you can variate a tag that unless you know that the document is standards-compliant / strict, it is sometimes just impossible to do. However, because I like a challenge that distracts me from work, here's how you might do it in RegEx!
I'll split this up into sections, no point if all you see is a string and say, "Meh... It'll do..."! First we have the main RegEx for an anchor tag:
'#<a></a>#'
Then we add in the text that could be between the tags.
We want to group this is parenthesis, so we can extract the string, and the question mark makes the asterix wildcard "un-greedy", meaning that the first </a> that it comes accross will be the one it uses to end the RegEx.
'#<a>(.*?)</a>#'
Next we add in the RegEx for href="". We match the href=" as plain text, then an any-length string that does not contain a quotation mark, then the ending quotation mark.
'#<a href\="([^"]*)">(.*?)</a>#'
Now we just need to say that the tag is allowed other attributes. According to the specification, an attribute can contain the following characters: [a-zA-Z_\:][a-zA-Z0-9_\:\.-]*.
Allow an attribute multiple times, and with a value, we get: ( [a-zA-Z_\:][a-zA-Z0-9_\:\.-]*\="[^"]*")*.
The resulting RegEx (PCRE) is as following:
'#<a( [a-zA-Z_\:][a-zA-Z0-9_\:\.-]*\="[^"]*")* href\="([^"]*)"( [a-zA-Z_\:][a-zA-Z0-9_\:\.-]*\="[^"]*")*>(.*?)</a>#'
Now, in PHP, use the preg_match_all() function to grab all occurances in the string.
$regex = '#<a( [a-zA-Z_\:][a-zA-Z0-9_\:\.-]*\="[^"]*")* href\="([^"]*)"( [a-zA-Z_\:][a-zA-Z0-9_\:\.-]*\="[^"]*")*>(.*?)</a>#';
preg_match_all($regex, $str_containing_anchors, $result);
foreach($result as $link)
{
$href = $link[2];
$text = $link[4];
}
use simplexml and xpath to retrieve the desired nodes
If you don't have some kind of request<->class mapping you can extract the information with the DOM extension. The property textConent contains all the text of the context node and its descendants.
$sr = '<?xml version="1.0"?>
<SOAP:Envelope xmlns:SOAP="urn:schemas-xmlsoap-org:soap.v1">
<SOAP:Body>
<foo:bar xmlns:foo="urn:yaddayadda">
<fragment>
Mary had a
little lamb
</fragment>
</foo:bar>
</SOAP:Body>
</SOAP:Envelope>';
$doc = new DOMDocument;
$doc->loadxml($sr);
$xpath = new DOMXPath($doc);
$ns = $xpath->query('//fragment');
if ( 0 < $ns->length ) {
echo $ns->item(0)->nodeValue;
}
prints
Mary had a
little lamb
If you want to strip or extract properties from only specific tag, you should try DOMDocument.
Something like this:
$TagWhiteList = array(
// Example of WhiteList
'b', 'i', 'u', 'strong', 'em', 'a', 'img'
);
function getTextFromNode($Node, $Text = "") {
// No tag, so it is a text
if ($Node->tagName == null)
return $Text.$Node->textContent;
// You may select a tag here
// Like:
// if (in_array($TextName, $TagWhiteList))
// DoSomthingWithIt($Text,$Node);
// Recursive to child
$Node = $Node->firstChild;
if ($Node != null)
$Text = getTextFromNode($Node, $Text);
// Recursive to sibling
while($Node->nextSibling != null) {
$Text = getTextFromNode($Node->nextSibling, $Text);
$Node = $Node->nextSibling;
}
return $Text;
}
function getTextFromDocument($DOMDoc) {
return getTextFromNode($DOMDoc->documentElement);
}
To use:
$Doc = new DOMDocument();
$Doc->loadHTMLFile("Test.html");
$Text = getTextFromDocument($Doc);
echo "Text from HTML: ".$Text."\n";
The above function is how to strip tags. But you can modify it a bit to manipulate the element. For example, if the tag is 'a' of archor, you can extract its target and display it instead of the text inside.
Hope this help.
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
This will remove all tags:
preg_replace("/<.*?>/", "", $string);
This will remove just the <a> tags:
preg_replace("/<\\/?a(\\s+.*?>|>)/", "", $string);
Avoid regular expressions whenever you can, especially when processing xml. In this case you can use strip_tags() or simplexml, depending on your string.
<?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.
Not pretty but does the job:
$data = str_replace('</a>', '', $data);
$data = preg_replace('/<a[^>]+href[^>]+>/', '', $data);
strip_tags() can also be used.
Please see examples here.
$pattern = '/href="([^"]*)"/';
I use this to replace the anchors with a text string...
function replaceAnchorsWithText($data) {
$regex = '/(<a\s*'; // Start of anchor tag
$regex .= '(.*?)\s*'; // Any attributes or spaces that may or may not exist
$regex .= 'href=[\'"]+?\s*(?P<link>\S+)\s*[\'"]+?'; // Grab the link
$regex .= '\s*(.*?)\s*>\s*'; // Any attributes or spaces that may or may not exist before closing tag
$regex .= '(?P<name>\S+)'; // Grab the name
$regex .= '\s*<\/a>)/i'; // Any number of spaces between the closing anchor tag (case insensitive)
if (is_array($data)) {
// This is what will replace the link (modify to you liking)
$data = "{$data['name']}({$data['link']})";
}
return preg_replace_callback($regex, array('self', 'replaceAnchorsWithText'), $data);
}
use str_replace