Remove a div by id with preg_replace

Question

hello i have an html string with output

$incoming_data = '<div id=\"title\">a title</div>';

And i want to remove it with preg_replace

i tried the code bellow without any luck..

result = preg_replace('#<div id="title">(.*?)</div>#', ' ', $incoming_data);

Any ideas?

Any ideas? Yep, show the actual HTML source (without escaped quotes for example). And when unversed with regex, use a DOM traversal frontend for modifying HTML. (Except if it's really for repetitive templating tasks of course.) — mario, Oct 24 '15 at 13:35

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:44

The variable $incoming_data contains escaped quotes, so you have to escape the backslash for the php regex pattern to match it.

Then your updated code would be:

$incoming_data = '<div id=\"title\">a title</div>';
$result = preg_replace('#<div id=\\\"title\\\">(.*?)</div>#', ' ', $incoming_data);

If you first want to strip the slashes from the string, you can use the stripslashes function.

Then your updated code would be:

$incoming_data = stripslashes('<div id=\"title\">a title</div>');
$result = preg_replace('#<div id="title">(.*?)</div>#', ' ', $incoming_data);

For the dom traversal you can use the DOMDocument class.

1 Answers1