Question

I have an HTML string, and I want to remove from it all DIVs whose class is “toremove”.

This is trivial to do on the client side with jQuery etc., but I want to do it on the server side with PHP.

A simple aegular expression won’t work, because divs may be nested…

Answer 1

You could use the DOM object and xPath to remove the DIVs.

/** UNTESTED **/
$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTMLFile($file);

$xpath = new DOMXpath($doc);
$elements = $xpath->query("*/div[@class='yourClasshere']");

foreach($elements as $e){
    $doc->removeChild($e);
}
$doc->saveHTMLFile($file);

You can replace the load from file and save to file with load from and save to string if you prefer.