How to remove anchor tag with its text from the string in PHP

Question

I have bellow string which has content and anchor tag:

$string = 'I am a lot of text with <a href="#">links in it</a>';

and I want to remove anchor tag with its text(links in it)

I have tried with strip_tags but it remains anchor text in the string, after that, I have tried with preg_replace with this example:

$string = preg_replace('/<a[^>]+>([^<]+)<\/a>/i', '\1', $string);

but getting same result as strip_tags.

I just want "I am a lot of text with" after removing anchor tag.

Any idea?

If you know exactly from where to where in the string the anchor is located, you could just use `substr()`. Or do you not know that? — Geshode, Dec 18 '17 at 06:08
[H̸̡̪̯ͨ͊̽̅̾̎Ȩ̬̩̾͛ͪ̈́̀́͘ ̶̧̨̱̹̭̯ͧ̾ͬC̷̙̲̝͖ͭ̏ͥͮ͟Oͮ͏̮̪̝͍M̲̖͊̒ͪͩͬ̚̚͜Ȇ̴̟̟͙̞ͩ͌͝S̨̥̫͎̭ͯ̿̔̀ͅ](https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/2394254) — mega6382, Dec 18 '17 at 06:09

Goma · Answer 1 · 2017-12-18T07:00:48.913

6

One way is to use .* wildcard inside <a and a>

$string = 'I am a lot of text with <a href="#">links in it</a>';
$string = preg_replace('/ <a.*a>/', '', $string);
echo $string;

In case of multiple anchor occurence, you can use .*?. Making your pattern '/ <a.*?a>/'

edited Dec 18 '17 at 07:00

answered Dec 18 '17 at 06:13

Goma

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`Text` is also valid html, therefore your answer does not protect 100% agains xss – jack Jan 24 '21 at 14:39

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 18 '17 at 06:09

2

How about doing it for explode. For your above example

$string = 'I am a lot of text with <a href="#">links in it</a>';
$string =explode("<a",$string);
echo $string[0];

answered Dec 18 '17 at 06:09

imox

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mega6382 · Answer 3 · 2017-12-18T06:25:29.080

you can simply use stristr() for this(DEMO):

<?php
$string = 'I am a lot of text with <a href="#">links in it</a> Lorem Ipsum';
//Get part before the <a
$stringBfr = stristr($string,'<a', true);
//get part after and along with </a>
$stringAftr = stristr($string,'</a>');
//Remove </a>
$stringAftr = str_replace('</a>', '', $stringAftr);
//concatenate the matched string.
$string = $stringBfr.$stringAftr;
var_dump($string);

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Dec 18 '17 at 06:14

 <?php 
    function strip_tags_content($text, $tags = '', $invert = FALSE) { 

      preg_match_all('/<(.+?)[\s]*\/?[\s]*>/si', trim($tags), $tags); 
      $tags = array_unique($tags[1]); 

      if(is_array($tags) AND count($tags) > 0) { 
        if($invert == FALSE) { 
          return preg_replace('@<(?!(?:'. implode('|', $tags) .')\b)(\w+)\b.*?>.*?</\1>@si', '', $text); 
        } 
        else { 
          return preg_replace('@<('. implode('|', $tags) .')\b.*?>.*?</\1>@si', '', $text); 
        } 
      } 
      elseif($invert == FALSE) { 
        return preg_replace('@<(\w+)\b.*?>.*?</\1>@si', '', $text); 
      } 
      return $text; 
    } 

echo strip_tags_content('<a href="google.com">google.com</a>')

    ?>

Strip_tags_content is used to delete all tags along with it's content See the first comment of php manual Strip Tags

How to remove anchor tag with its text from the string in PHP

4 Answers4