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Well, I always have many dificulties with regex or regular expressions, so I'm asking help with this.

I'm trying to explore the html editing capabilities of browser, but most times I got things I don't need, like this one

<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><font face="verdana"><br></font></span></div>

Can someone be so nice to provide me a regex to transform this into just <br> ?

the ideal deal was if possible to have one dealing with diferent combinations like font face could be other than verdana and the style for text-align could be center per example.

Thanks in advance.

Pluda

Cfreak
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Pluda
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    Don't use regexes to parse HTML. Here's a pretty good post on how to do it correctly: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3650125/how-to-parse-html-with-php – Cfreak Jun 10 '11 at 16:28
  • How do you decide what you want to keep, and what you want to strip out? The only real thing I see here is that `` is deprecated and should not be in your html. –  Jun 10 '11 at 16:29
  • If you really want to understand why you should never try to parse (x)html with regex read on: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags – afarazit Jun 10 '11 at 16:55
  • Thanks for the link, going to studdy it :-) – Pluda Jun 10 '11 at 16:55

2 Answers2

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Regular expressions are not the right path due to their limitations for parsing HTML.

I think you'd be better off looking into strip_tags(). Particularly using the second parameter on which tags to allow. However, determining which tags to remove and keep may be difficult in your case. You may want to update your question if this is indeed the case.

Jason McCreary
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If you want to remove a fixed accumulation of HTML soup with a simple br tag, then a regex could be workable. I don't see the difficulty here however. Your string contains no meta characters itself. So you only have to replace left and Verdana with placeholders like \w+ or [\w\s]+ and put everything into delimiters like #.

mario
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  • I think I'll go for the link in first answer, however, could you please provide me a example? Realy I don't know how to apply this \w\s. Thanks – Pluda Jun 10 '11 at 16:58