Question

I am trying to clean up some HTML values that are imported from other sources, primarily email message bodies. Ideally, I would like to be able to strip <style> and <link> tags, but also apply their styles (assuming the link tag points to a style sheet) to the appropriate elements within the value.

I am currently trying to accomplish this via tidy. If it comes down to it, I can strip out the tags without applying the styles.

Answer 1

you could use php’s simple-xml functions to assign the styles to your markup.

or write some custom implementation to manipulate the html (which is not a good practice tbh) if you don’t want to get into the simplexml lib.

$dirtyInput = '<!-- your html string -->';

$regex = '/<style[^>]>(.*?)</style>/is';
if (preg_match_all($regex, $dirtyInput, $inlineStyles)) {

    // your inline styles will be in $inlineStyles
    $cleanedOutput = preg_replace($regex . 'g', '', $dirtyInput );
}


$regex = '/<link[^>]*href="([^"]+)"*[^>]*>/is';
if (preg_match_all($regex, $dirtyInput, $externalFiles)) {

    // hrefs of external stylesheets $externalFiles;
    $cleanedOutput = preg_replace($regex . 'g', '', $cleanedOutput);
}

// more code to read styles from external css files and apply their styles and the inline styles to your markup (not a quick task...)