Question

echo $nav gives code like this:

<ul>
    <li class="someclass">sometext
        <ul>
            <li class="someclass">sometext</li>
            <li class="spacer"></li>
            <li class="someclass">sometext</li>
            <li class="spacer"></li>
            <li class="someclass">sometext</li>
            <li class="spacer"></li>
            <li class="someclass">sometext</li>
            <li class="spacer"></li>
        </ul>
    </li>
    <li class="spacer"></li>
    <li class="someclass">sometext</li>
    <li class="spacer"></li>
</ul>

There are list items with class spacer inside each child ul, after each normal list item.
How do I remove the spacer list items which are grandchildren of the main list, using PHP?
Example: <ul> <li> <ul> <li class="spacer">

---

I’m searching for a regular expression, which should erase <li class="spacer"></li> only in a child <ul> element.

Answer 1

How about str_replace?

    $nav = str_replace('<li class="spacer"></li>','',$nav);

edited code below

Based on the new requirement this code works. I know its hacky and sloppy but it works:

    $temp = explode("\n",$nav);

    for ($i=0;$i<count($temp);$i++) {

            if (strstr($temp[$i],"<ul>")) {
                    $nested_ul = 1;
            }

            if (strstr($temp[$i],"</ul>")) {
                    $nested_ul = 0;
            }

            if ($nested_ul==0) {
                    if (!strstr($temp[$i],"spacer")) {

                            $new_nav .= $temp[$i]."\n";
                    }
            } else {
                    $new_nav .= $temp[$i]."\n";
            }
    }


    echo $new_nav;