Filter names and surnames with regex

Question

in my PHP script I have a variable like the following:

$names = '<a href="%URL$%" rel="tag">Name Surname</a>, <a href="%URL$%" rel="tag">Name Surname</a>, <a href="%URL$%" rel="tag">Name Surname</a>';

Is it possible to filter $names in order to have this result?

$names = '<a href="%URL$%" rel="tag">N. Surname</a>, <a href="%URL$%" rel="tag">N. Surname</a>, <a href="%URL$%" rel="tag">N. Surname</a>';

Yes, using [DOM manipulation](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27222/dom-manipulation-in-php). A regex is [not going to help](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags). — CodeCaster, Jun 13 '12 at 11:30
What do you mean by filter? You just want to replace "Name" with "N.". Are there other requirements? — stema, Jun 13 '12 at 11:56
Yes, I obviously have different names and I'd like to take only the first character followed by a dot. ex: John Smith, Mark Twain => J. Smith, M. Twain — Pennywise83, Jun 13 '12 at 12:08

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 28 '13 at 19:28

You could use preg_replace_callback:

$names = preg_replace_callback(
             '/(<a[^>]*>)(\w+)( \w+</a>)',
             function($matches) {
                 return $matches[1] . substr($matches[2], 0, 1) . "." . $matches[3];
             },
             $names
         );

score -1 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 13 '12 at 11:32

-1

Really short answer: Use a HTML parser (like http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net/)

Regexes and HTML only work when you are sure you are only pulling apart a really predictable string of code.

answered Jun 13 '12 at 11:32

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Filter names and surnames with regex

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