Regular Expressions - My Code Does Not Behave

Question

<p>Blockbuster event so big that the excerpt will not even fit into the allotted space.</p> 
<p> The post 
     <a rel="nofollow" href="http://example.com/event/sample-event/">Sample Event</a> 
    appeared first on 
     <a rel="nofollow" href="http://example.com">abc</a>.
</p>

$desc = preg_replace('/<p>(.*)<\/p>/i', '$1', $event->description);
$desc = substr($desc, 0, strpos($desc, 'The post'));

Hey, I'm trying to strip tags and extract only the part until 'The post'. I have tried /<p>(.*)<\/p>/ but this returns both parts of the description. To achieve the end result I had to take a sub string. Is there a regex that takes care of this so I don't need to use substr()?

Answer 1

Make the expression "ungreedy":

$desc = preg_replace('/<p>(.*)<\/p>/Ui', '$1', $event->description);

or

$desc = preg_replace('/<p>(.*?)<\/p>/i', '$1', $event->description);

If you want to keep just the contents of the first <p> tag, it may be simpler to preg_match and keep the result:

preg_match('/<p>(.*)<\/p>/Ui', $event->description, $results);
$desc = $results[1];

Here's a demo: https://ideone.com/KFLdnI