[RESOLVED] Regular Expression??

stebut05

Hi,

I hope you are well. Thanks for looking a this post. I'm trying to do a search and replace and need help writing a regular expression for doing my search. I have no experience of coding regular expressions, and was looking for some help, advice, etc.

I'm looking for a regualar expression that will search for the following:

<span> tag, but the styles within this tag are different and not always the same. For example it could be the following on one page:

But on another it could be

Therefore, a regular expression that search for <span ***** everthing in between upto >

I hope this makes sense. Thanks in advance for any help, advice, etc.

Have a nice day,

Ste

NogDog

preg_match('/<span(\s[^>]*)?>/i', $string, $matches);

stebut05

Hi NogDog,

Thanks for reply. Just got your message, but also found a function to remove HTML tags. Thought i would post for other memebers to view.

 function stripTags($tag, $string) {
        // Regular expressions only work with strings if the regexp has been pre-concocted
    $regExp = "<" . "$tag" . "[^>]*>";

$string = str_replace("</$tag>", "", $string);
$string = ereg_replace($regExp, "", $string);

return $string;   
}

Once again, thanks for reply.

Regards,

Ste

NogDog

This will deal with upper- and/or lower-case tags, and may deal better with mutli-line text:

<?php
function stripTags($tag, $string) {
   return(preg_replace('#<'.$tag.'(?:\s[^>]*)?>(.*)</'.$tag.'>#iUs', '\\1', $string));
}

// test it:
header('Content-Type: text/plain');
$test = "This is <span style='blah'>a\ntest</Span>. It is <SPAN>only</span> a test.";
echo stripTags('span', $test);

Also, depending on what exactly you are trying to do, there's always the built-in [man]strip_tags/man function.