Question

Consider the following HTML string:

<p>This is line 1 <br /> and this is line 2</p>

How can i replace the above with the following string using PHP / Regex

<p><span class="single-line">This is line 1</span><span class="single-line">and this is line 2</span></p>

Answer 1

This works but I would advise you not to rely on regular expressions for HTML parsing / transformation:

$string = '<p>This is line 1 <br /> and this is line 2</p>';
$pattern = '~([^<>]+)<br[[:blank:]]*/?>([^<>]+)~i';
$replacement = '<span class="single-line">$1</span><span class="single-line">$2</span>';

echo preg_replace($pattern, $replacement, $string);