Question

For example, i have something like this:

<i id="text">text</i><br><i>text2</i>

and I want to change it to something like this:

<b>text</b><br><i>text2</i>

so it will keep the <i>text2</i>

but change the <i id="text">text</i> into <b>text</b>

is that even possible?

Answer 1

Assuming there are no nested <i> tags, this should do the trick:

Input regular expression: <i id=".*?">(.*?)</i>

Replacement: <b>\1</b>

$output = preg_replace('/<i id=".*?">(.*?)<\/i>/i', '<b>\1</b>', $input);

Untested, but it should work.