Remove first element from string

Question

I have a string that's made up of the following html:

<p> </p>
<h2>Content</h2>
<p>Content</p>
<h2>Content</h2>
<p>Content</p>

How can I remove the first element completely (even it's content) and leave me with the rest of the string?

It should be noted that the first element could be anything or contain anything.

please also check https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1171597/how-to-remove-an-html-element-using-the-domdocument-class - or just search "removing HTML elements from DOM document", you'll find lots of examples — PolishDeveloper, Jun 20 '18 at 13:27

PolishDeveloper · Accepted Answer · 2018-06-20T13:25:38.170

3

You can use the DOM library:

 $document = DOMDocument::loadHTML( $yourString );
 $childToRemove = $document->getElementsByTagName('p')->item(0);
 $childToRemove->parentNode->removeChild($childToRemove);


 //get the string
 return $document->saveHTML();

edited Jun 20 '18 at 13:25

answered Jun 20 '18 at 13:16

PolishDeveloper

930
5
17

1

OP says the first element can _be_ anything... so maybe `$document->item(0);`? – OK sure Jun 20 '18 at 13:21
thats just an example, the http://php.net/manual/en/class.domdocument.php is pretty good and full of examples. The question looks like "how to remove something from DOM structure" – PolishDeveloper Jun 20 '18 at 13:25

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 20 '18 at 13:14

You can explode on line breaks and remove the first element with array_shift:

$html = '<p> </p>
    <h2>Content</h2>
    <p>Content</p>
    <h2>Content</h2>
    <p>Content</p>';
$lines = explode(PHP_EOL, $html); // break into lines
array_shift($lines); // remove first element
$newHtml = implode(PHP_EOL, $lines); // rejoin lines
echo $newHtml;

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 20 '18 at 13:14

0

You could use something like this:

$split = explode("<h2>", $str);
unset($split[0]);
$str = "<h2>" + implode("<h2>", $split);

answered Jun 20 '18 at 13:14

PhilMasteG

3,095
1
20
27

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Jun 20 '18 at 13:28

DOM manipulation may be the best here but the following regex is will replace the tags it finds.

<[^/]*/.*>

Essentially, match < and everything up until it finds a /.*> so it will work for a self closing tag like <br/> or a standard <p> </p> but it won't work for an unclosed HTML tag like <br>.

For preg_replace, you can specify the 4th argument to limit it to only one replacement:

preg_replace("/<[^\/]+\/.*>/", "", $str, 1);

Remove first element from string

4 Answers4