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Asked: 2026-06-05T06:46:11+00:00

I am not good at regex. I got this string with some html <a>

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I am not good at regex.

I got this string with some html <a> tags and i need to strip some of them out, but only <a> tags containing a certain value in the “href” attribut (mysite.com).

I still need to keep the link text, like the php function strip_tags($string, "<a>")

Here is what I got so far.:

/<a href=["\']?(http:\/\/mysite.com[^"\'\s>]+)["\'\s>]?/i

This is also working, but the problem is that I can’t get the “text” in fx. <a href="http://mysite.com/testing/something">"text"</a>

So the input.:

Lorem ipsum <a href="http://mysite.com/testing/something">dolor</a> sit amet, <a href="http://keepingThisLink.com">consectetur</a> adipiscing elit. Duis dignissim <a href="http://mysite.com/testing">golor</a> vitae turpis fermentum tincidunt.

Should output.:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, <a href="http://keepingThisLink.com">consectetur</a> adipiscing elit. Duis dignissim golor vitae turpis fermentum tincidunt.
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Here’s a more reliable, DOM-based approach:

    <?php

$a = 'Lorem ipsum <a href="http://mysite.com/testing/something">dolor</a> sit amet, <a href="http://keepingThisLink.com">consectetur</a> adipiscing elit. Duis dignissim <a href="http://mysite.com/testing">golor</a> vitae turpis fermentum tincidunt.';

$domd = new DOMDocument();
libxml_use_internal_errors(true);
$domd->loadHTML($a);

$domx = new DOMXPath($domd);
foreach ($domx->query("//a") as $link) {
    $href = $link->getAttribute("href");
    if ($href === "http://keepingThisLink.com") {
        continue;
    }

    $text = $domd->createTextNode($link->nodeValue);

    $link->parentNode->replaceChild($text, $link);
}

//unfortunately saveHTML adds doctype and a few unneccessary tags    
var_dump(preg_replace('/^<!DOCTYPE.+?>/', '', str_replace( array('<html>', '</html>', '<body>', '</body>'), array('', '', '', ''), $domd->saveHTML())));

    the output is:

    string(161) "
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, <a href="http://keepingThisLink.com">consectetur</a> adipiscing elit. Duis dignissim golor vitae turpis fermentum tincidunt.</p>
"
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