Question

How to use preg_replace, remove all the links with class="country" and remain the links’ text.

<a href="XXXXXX" class="country">TEXT</a> => TEXT

How to modify the preg_replace below?

$str = <<<EOT
Long long ago, there was a poor boy named <a href="index1.html">John</a>. Who was living in <a href="index2.html">Liverpoor</a>, a city of <a href="index3.html" class="country">england</a>.
EOT;
$result= preg_replace('/<a(.*?)class="country"(.*?)>(.*?)<\/a>/i','$3',$str);
echo $result;
// I want get the result as: "Long long ago, there was a poor boy named <a href="index1.html">John</a>. Who was living in <a href="index2.html">Liverpoor</a>, a city of england"

Answer 1

This will work with most cases:

$result= preg_replace('/<a [^>]*class="country"[^>]*>([^<]+)<\/a>/i','$1',$str);

but please consider using DOM parser instead