Remove image from string based on src url

Question

I am looking for an easy and efficient way to remove a specific image from an article. All that I know is the image URL of the image that I need to remove.

The image may or may not use different attributes.
The image may or may not exist at all in the article.
There might be other images (not same url) in the article.

My choice would be either regex or DOMDocument, probably using an HTML5 parser like https://github.com/Masterminds/html5-php.

My regex skills are not that good, and I'm not sure if it's a good idea to use regex to accomplish this because I read that regex should be avoided to parse HTML. What I have with so far with regex, is to remove the complete image, but not sure how to remove it based on a specific src url.

$img_src = 'http://www.example.org/image_to_be_removed.jpg';

$article = '<h1>Test article with HTML5 tags</h1>
<nav><a href="/link1/">Link 1</a></nav>
<p>This is an example article. The article may or may not include html5 tags, images and other things.</p>
<img src="http://www.example.org/image_to_be_removed.jpg">
<p>More example text.</p>';

$article = preg_replace("/<img[^>]+\>/i", "", $article);
echo $article;

I haven't dug into the DOMDocument solution yet, because I am not sure if it's even possible or if regex might be considered best practice?

I can't use Javascript because it's a sever side script in WordPress. Before the article is being added to WordPress, I need to double check if the article itself contains the featured image that was set, and if so, remove it from the article. — Kevin M, May 20 '18 at 02:52
Even if regex is good, my regex skills are not good enough to search by src URL of an image. — Kevin M, May 20 '18 at 02:53
Well if it's a specific image use a simple str_replace, that way you avoid removing other images you may not want to remove. — Robert, May 20 '18 at 03:01
@ Robert Rocha Do you have an example? How can I use str_replace to find an image if I have only the URL and I don't know if the image inside the tag uses attributes, styles or classes. If I use str_replace on just the URL, then I'll end up with the image tag intact but no src. — Kevin M, May 20 '18 at 03:05
Do you want the entire img tag removed or just the url to the image? — Joseph_J, May 20 '18 at 03:08
let me see if I can come up with something based on the criteria you listed above — Robert, May 20 '18 at 03:08

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered May 20 '18 at 03:46

3

use preg_quote:

$article = preg_replace("/<img[^>]+src=\"" . preg_quote($img_src, '/') . "\"[^>]*\>/i", "", $article);

Regex Demo

php Demo

answered May 20 '18 at 03:46

Matt.G

3,586
2
10
23

Looked at your Demo at regex101.com and tried your logic with +alt instead of +src. This worked perfectly for my problem! Learned something new today. ]+alt="Picture"[^>]*\> – Karel Jul 22 '21 at 14:43

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered May 20 '18 at 03:40

You can try this. It seems to test ok. At any rate it should give you an idea as to how to proceed.

$img_src = 'http://www.example.org/image_to_be_removed.jpg';

$article = '<h1>Test article with HTML5 tags</h1>
<nav><a href="/link1/">Link 1</a></nav>
<p>This is an example article. The article may or may not include html5 tags, images and other things.</p>
<img style="width:100px;" src="http://www.example.org/image_to_be_removed.jpg" class="myClass">
<p>More example text.</p>';

$article = preg_replace('/\s{1,}/', ' ', $article);  //Very important step to make sure only 1 space exist between any character.
$img_src = preg_replace('/\//', '\\/', $img_src); //Adds slashes to the url.
$regex = '/<img[\W\D\w]{0,}src=\"' . $img_src . '\"[\W\D\w]{0,}>\s/'; //Define the regex.
$article = preg_replace($regex, '', $article);
echo $article;

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered May 20 '18 at 03:48

You can try below with str_replace

<?php
$img_src = 'http://www.example.org/image_to_be_removed.jpg';

$article = '<h1>Test article with HTML5 tags</h1>
<nav><a href="/link1/">Link 1</a></nav>
<p>This is an example article. The article may or may not include html5 tags, images and other things.</p>
<img src="http://www.example.org/image_to_be_removed.jpg">
<p>More example text.</p>';
$new = str_replace('src="http://www.example.org/image_to_be_removed.jpg"','',$article);
echo $article;
echo '<br/>';
echo $new;
?>

there is both preg_replace from your code and str_replace,to notice deference. There are other function to do the same like sprintf,strtr,str_replace and preg_replace you can use whichever suites

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered May 20 '18 at 07:46

It is not recommended to parse html with regex.

As you suggested, you might for example use DOMDocument or for example PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser.

Because you state that "All that I know is the image URL of the image that I need to remove", you could find the src attribute of the img tag using xpath or looking for the tag name and check that.

Example DOMDocument:

$img_src = 'http://www.example.org/image_to_be_removed.jpg';
$article = '<h1>Test article with HTML5 tags</h1>
<nav><a href="/link1/">Link 1</a></nav>
<p>This is an example article. The article may or may not include html5 tags, images and other things.</p><img src="http://www.example.org/image_to_be_removed.jpg"><img src="http://www.example.org/image_not_to_be_removed.jpg"><p>More example text.</p>\';
<p>More example text.</p>';
$dom = new DOMDocument();
libxml_use_internal_errors(true);
$dom->loadHTML($article);
$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);
$elements = $xpath->query("//img");
foreach ($elements as $elememnt) {
    if ($elememnt->getAttribute("src") === $img_src) {
        $elememnt->parentNode->removeChild($elememnt);
    }
}
echo $dom->saveHTML();

Example PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser using simple_html_dom.php:

$htmlDom = str_get_html($article);
foreach($htmlDom ->find('img[src=http://www.example.org/image_to_be_removed.jpg]') as $item) {
    $item->outertext = '';
}
$htmlDom->save();
echo $htmlDom;

Remove image from string based on src url

4 Answers4