Question

I have lots of text marked up like this:

<span class="section">[<a href="blablabla">Section</a>]</span>

I need to remove everything that has class=”section” including span tags and text inside it. I’m looking for a regex or an alternativeto automate this task.

Any clues?

edit: Im up to anything that helps me solve this, i thought regex was the easier way. i’m coding in PHP.

Thanks.

Answer 1

If your section-class tags don’t contain elements of the same type (e.g. you do not have spans containing spans) you can do this quite easily with a regex.

The following is the simplest:

$stripped = preg_replace('@<span class="section">.*?</span>@', '', $input);

This, if you need it, allows for any tag, any other attributes, and any other classes:

$stripped = preg_replace('@<(\w+)[^>]*class="[^"]*section[^"]*"[^>]*>.*?</\1>@', '', $input);