php remove the links and content

Question

Hi all I've a little php question:

I've a many strings like that:

$content = "Hi I am a <a href='http://blabla' ...>black</a> cat";

How can i convert this string to:

$content = "Hi I am a cat";

I tried that but doesn't works...

$content = preg_replace("/<a href=.*?>(.*?)<\/a>/","$1",$content);

Answer 1

It looks just about right.

I just tried this and it seemed to work fine:

$content = preg_replace("/<a href=.*?>(.*?)<\/a>/","",$content);

Answer 2

No use REGEX!!!! Use strip_tags.

echo strip_tags( "Hi I am a <a href='http://blabla' ...> black</a> cat" );
// Hi I am a  black cat 
// (there will be a double space there because a space comes before and after
// the opening for the <a> tag. You can use str_replace('  ', ' ', $val) to get
// rid of all double spaces/

If you are simply trying to get rid of the "black" as well, you might want to try DomDocument:

$doc = new DomDocument();
$doc->loadXML( "<root>" . // you'll need a root.
       "Hi I am a <a href='http://blabla' ...> black</a> cat".
"</root>");
$nodes = array();
foreach( $doc->getElementsByTagName('a') as $item )
{
   $nodes[]=$item;
}
foreach( $nodes as $node )
{
   if( $node->parentNode ) $node->parentNode->removeChild($node);
}
echo $doc->documentElement->nodeValue;