Removing links with preg_replace but keeping images inside

Question

I'm using:

$this->tresc[$i][description]=preg_replace("/\<a .*\>.*\<\/a\>/i", "", $this->tresc[$i][description]);

to remove links.

Sometimes the links are having images inside I would like to keep:

<a href="http://www.domain.com/page.php"><img src="http://domain.com/image.jpg" alt="Image" align="left" /></a>

Is this possible ? Now everything beetween <a> and </a> is removed.

[Don't use regexes for parsing HTML](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454) — John Conde, Jul 08 '12 at 14:09
@spa - You'd use that function instead of your `preg_replace()` — Lix, Jul 08 '12 at 14:18

score 7 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 08 '12 at 14:12

PHP's strip_tags() function allows you to specify what HTML entities you want to leave untouched.

http://php.net/manual/en/function.strip-tags.php

You can use the optional second parameter to specify tags which should not be stripped.

strip_tags($rssContent, '<img>');

That should remove/sanitize all HTML elements leaving the <img> tags alone.

The comment section of that page in the PHP documentation also contains loads of helpful functions that might be useful to you. I recommend reading through them.
This one specifically looks interesting.

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 10 '12 at 11:27

2

I did this:

$this->tresc[$i][description]=preg_replace("/<a href=\"(.*)\">/i", "",$this->tresc[$i][description]);
$this->tresc[$i][description]=preg_replace("/<\/a\>/i", "",$this->tresc[$i][description]);

But this is leaving text that's on the link.

answered Jul 10 '12 at 11:27

Spacedust

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Removing links with preg_replace but keeping images inside

2 Answers2