Question

I need some help writing a regular expression pattern in PHP. I need to take a string containing HTML, find all anchor tags that contain a LOCAL href and remove the tags, while keeping the text within the tag.

Example:

<a href="/link1.html">Link 1</a> 
<a href="../link2.html">Link 2</a>
<a href="http://www.localdomain.com/link3.html">Link 3</a> 

should become:

Link 1
Link 2
Link 3

EDIT:
I’m looking for something like this:

function remove_internal_links($content) {
  $pattern = '/<a href="([^"])/';
  $content = preg_replace($pattern, '\\1', $content);
}   

Where I need help (obviously) is with the $pattern.

Thanks!

Answer 1

You could use some third part library to parse the html like PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser

// Create DOM from URL or file
$html = file_get_html('http://www.google.com/');

// Find all links 
foreach($html->find('a') as $element) 
       if($element->href ...);