strip a certain tag format from html using regex

Question

suppose I have this string:

some striinnngggg <a href="something/some_number">linkk</a> soooo <a href="someotherthing/not_number">asdfsadf</a>

I want to strip tags from this string that contains the tag format <a href="something/some_number"></a> without stripping the content of that tag where some_number can be any number

Hence in the example above, the desired end results is

some striinnngggg linkk soooo <a href="someotherthing/not_number">asdfsadf</a>

notice that the second tag did not get stripped since the second part of the link is not a number

how would I accomplish this using regex/php's preg functions

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#answer-1732454 — Axeman, Mar 23 '12 at 23:00

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 23 '12 at 20:25

Detecting such tags with a regex is quite complicated since the order of the attributes can change, values can be delimited with double quotes, simple quotes, or none.

I think a easier way to do this is using DOMDocument to find matching tags:

$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadHTML($html);

$links = $dom->getElementsByTagName('a');

foreach ($links as $link) {
  if (preg_match("/[a-zA-Z0-9]+\/[0-9]+/", $link->getAttribute('href'))) {
    echo $link->nodeValue; // do whatever you need to do with the string here
  }
}

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 23 '12 at 20:23

1

Expression:

(<a.+?href=".*?\d.*?".*?>)(.+?)(</a>)

Find that, and replace with the second token (depending on your language it might be $2 or \1 or \2), which is just the link text.

answered Mar 23 '12 at 20:23

qJake

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strip a certain tag format from html using regex

2 Answers2