preg replace to remove a div from a string-CodePudding

I'm trying to remove a HTML element from a string,

I have the following preg_replace ;

    $body = preg_replace('#<div  style="margin: 8px 0; clear: both;">(.*?)</div>#', '', $body);

But the preg_replace doesn't seem to work;

Here is the full code;

    $html = new DOMDocument();
     @$html->loadHtmlFile($url);
     $xpath = new DOMXPath( $html );
     $nodelist = $xpath->query( '//*[@]' );
     $body = '';
    foreach ($nodelist as $n){
        $body .= $html->saveHtml($n)."\n";
    } 
    
    $body = preg_replace('#<div  style="margin: 8px 0; clear: both;">(.*?)</div>#', '', $body);

The current output is this;

<div >
hello this is content
<div  style="margin: 8px 0; clear: both;">
<div><center><span style="font-size:11px; color: gray;"TEST</span></center>
<b>TEST</b><br><br></div></div>
<div >
    </ul></div><!-- AI CONTENT END 1 -->
<div  style="margin-bottom:15px; font-weight: bold; text-align:center;">Tags: <a href="#" rel="tag">test</a> <a href="#" rel="tag">#tag</a></div>
</div>

And my desired output is ;

<div >
hello this is content
</div>

I really appreciate any help I'm sure there is an easier way to achieve this I'm just not entirely sure why my current method is not working thankyou.

CodePudding user response：

This is cheating a bit. The main problem with trying to use regex to parse HTML is the nesting tags, which will drive you to madness. If you truly only need to keep the first <div> and the content that occurs before the second <div>, the below will work.

preg_match('#<div >(.*)<div.*$#Us', $body, $matches);
$body = '<div >' . $matches[1] . '</div>';

... since we're just extracting the content we need, and inserting it into the content format that's static.

Foul

CodePudding user response：

Depending of the input but maybe :

<?php
$input = '
<div >
hello this is content
<div  style="margin: 8px 0; clear: both;">
<div><center><span style="font-size:11px; color: gray;"TEST</span></center>
<b>TEST</b><br><br></div></div>
<div >
    </ul></div><!-- AI CONTENT END 1 -->
<div  style="margin-bottom:15px; font-weight: bold; text-align:center;">Tags: <a href="#" rel="tag">test</a> <a href="#" rel="tag">#tag</a></div>
</div>';
$data = preg_replace('#^.*?(<div[^>] >[^<] ).*(</div>).*?$#s', '$1$2', $input);
echo '<pre>';
echo htmlentities($data);
/*
<div >
hello this is content
</div>
*/