Question

I have a string and within that string are some links of the format

<a href="...some url...">Text</a>

I want to replace that entire section with a different piece of markup

The problem is that while I can get the overall structure of the markup to be replaced; and also the URL, it’s not so easy for me to get the “Text”. If I knew the entire link then I might do something like.

‘str_replace( $each_link , $my_new_markup , $the_original_string );’

and iterate through each link, but I cant because I cant know what $each_link is going to be exactly.

Is there any way to look for something like this? I am thinking it must have something to do with REGEX but I am totally hopeless at it, and I don’t even know if that’s the right place to start.

<a href="...some url..."> [WILDCARD of some kind] </a>

Answer 1

You could look at a class like this, Simple HTML DOM Parser that you can use to cycle through elements searching for a specific inner html or other attribute and then change it.

Code looking something like this

foreach($html->find('a') as $element) {
  if ($element->innertext == $needle) {
    $element->innertext = $my_new_markup;
  }
}