Str_replace with regex

Question

Say I have the following link:

<li class="hook">
      <a href="i_have_underscores">I_have_underscores</a>
</li>

How would I, remove the underscores only in the text and not the href? I have used str_replace, but this removes all underscores, which isn't ideal.

So basically I would be left with this output:

<li class="hook">
      <a href="i_have_underscores">I have underscores</a>
</li>

Any help, much appreciated

Answer 1

It's safer to parse HTML with DOMDocument instead of regex. Try this code:

<?php

function replaceInAnchors($html)
{
    $dom = new DOMDocument();
    // loadHtml() needs mb_convert_encoding() to work well with UTF-8 encoding
    $dom->loadHtml(mb_convert_encoding($html, 'HTML-ENTITIES', "UTF-8"));

    $xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);

    foreach($xpath->query('//text()[(ancestor::a)]') as $node)
    {
        $replaced = str_ireplace('_', ' ', $node->wholeText);
        $newNode  = $dom->createDocumentFragment();
        $newNode->appendXML($replaced);
        $node->parentNode->replaceChild($newNode, $node);
    }

    // get only the body tag with its contents, then trim the body tag itself to get only the original content
    return mb_substr($dom->saveXML($xpath->query('//body')->item(0)), 6, -7, "UTF-8");
}

$html = '<li class="hook">
      <a href="i_have_underscores">I_have_underscores</a>
</li>';
echo replaceInAnchors($html);

Answer 2

You can use a HTML DOM parser to get the text within the tags, and then run your str_replace() function on the result.

---

Using the DOM Parser I linked, it is as simple as something like this:

$html = str_get_html(
    '<li class="hook"><a href="i_have_underscores">I_have_underscores</a></li>');
$links = $html->find('a');   // You can use any css style selectors here

foreach($links as $l) {
    $l->innertext = str_replace('_', ' ', $l->innertext)
}

echo $html
//<li class="hook"><a href="i_have_underscores">I have underscores</a></li>

That's it.