preg_replace HTML code in PHP

Question

I want to remove string like below from a html code <span style="font-size: 0.8px; letter-spacing: -0.8px; color: #ecf6f6">3</span>

so I came up with regex.

$pattern = "/<span style=\"font-size: \\d(\\.\\d)?px; letter-spacing: -\\d(\\.\\d)?px; color: #\\w{6}\">\\w\\w?</span>/um";

However, regex doesn’t work. Can someone point me what i did wrong. I'm new to PHP.

when I tested with a simple regex, it works so problem remains with the regex.

  $str = $_POST["txtarea"];
  $pattern = $_POST["regex"];
  echo preg_replace($pattern, "", $str);

I just wrote a regex and get php regex pattern generated. not sure what's that in PHP as well. Removing it still doesn't fix the problem though. — Tuan Anh Tran, Apr 09 '13 at 02:29
Enable `error_reporting`, then google the resulting warning. — mario, Apr 09 '13 at 02:31
@KennethK. basically what inside that has style like `style="font-size: 0.8px; letter-spacing: -0.8px; color: #ecf6f6` — Tuan Anh Tran, Apr 09 '13 at 02:36

Ja͢ck · Accepted Answer · 2013-04-09T02:43:54.960

As much as I would advocate DOMDocument to do the job here, you would still need some regular expression down the line, so ...

The expression for the px numeric value can be simply [\d.-]+, since you're not trying to validate anything.

The contents of the span can be simplified to [^<]* (i.e. anything but a opening bracket):

$re = '/<span style="font-size: [\d.-]+px; letter-spacing: [\d.-]+px; color: #[0-9a-f]{3,6}">[^<]*<\/span>/';

echo preg_replace($re, '', $str);

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:21

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Do not use regex for this problem. Use an html parser. Here is a solution in python with BeautifulSoup, because I like this library for these tasks:

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

with open('Path/to/file', 'r') as content_file:
    content = content_file.read()

soup = BeautifulSoup(content)
for div in soup.findAll('span', {'style':re.compile("font-size: \d(\.\d)?px; letter-spacing: -\d(\.\d)?px; color: #\w{6}")}):
    div.extract()

with open('Path/to/file.modified', 'w') as output_file:
    output_file.write(str(soup))

edited May 23 '17 at 12:21

Community

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answered Apr 09 '13 at 02:36

000

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That doesn't look like PHP to me. – Ja͢ck Apr 09 '13 at 02:37
I don't think OP absolutely needs php, they just picked it. – 000 Apr 09 '13 at 02:38
Yeah I like php as much as anyone else, but beautifulsoup is a great tool, and you gotta use the right tool for the job. http://www.codinghorror.com/.a/6a0120a85dcdae970b017742d249d5970d-800wi – 000 Apr 09 '13 at 02:40
PHP has DOMDocument too, so I'm not sure where you were going with that comment :) – Ja͢ck Apr 09 '13 at 02:43
I'm just not familiar with DOMDocument. – 000 Apr 09 '13 at 02:44

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered May 26 '14 at 11:02

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you have a slash ( / ) in your ending tag ( closing span )

you need to escape it or to use a different delimiter than slash

answered May 26 '14 at 11:02

Sly

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preg_replace HTML code in PHP

3 Answers3