Question

I need to convert

$text = 'We had <i>fun</i>. Look at <a href="http://example.com">this photo</a> of Joe';

[Edit] There could be multiple links in the text.

to

$text = 'We had fun. Look at this photo (http://example.com) of Joe';

All HTML tags are to be removed and the href value from <a> tags needs to be added like above.

What would be an efficient way to solve this with regex? Any code snippet would be great.

Answer 1

First do a preg_replace to keep the link. You could use:

preg_replace('<a href="(.*?)">(.*?)</a>', '$\2 ($\1)', $str);

Then use strip_tags which will finish off the rest of the tags.