Question

I have 1000 HTML documents, which inside I have

$contenido="<p>TFJFA<div>whatsapp</div></p><p>second parragraph</p><p>third parragraph </p><p>night</p>";

I need to remove the first </p> tag; the result must be:

$contenido="<p>second parragraph</p><p>third parragraph </p><p>night</p>";

I’ve tried to use this regular expression, but it doesn’t work.

$pattern = '/\<p\>.*?\</p\>(.*)/';
$contenido=preg_replace($pattern, '$1'. $contenido);

Answer 1

Your pattern contains an un-escaped / within it, and you’re also using / as your regex delimiter (i.e. /regex/). You can either escape the internal / (in the closing tag) or use a different delimiter:

$pattern = '/<p>.*?<\/p>(.*)/'; 

OR (I like this option better, it’s easier to understand – I chose ‘@’ as the delimiter):

$pattern = '@<p>.*?</p>(.*)@';

Also, instead of replacing that with $1, you could just have your pattern as @<p>.*?</p>@, replace with '', and feed in 1 as the $limit argument to preg_replace.