Question

i want to grab text from HTML do some process and change to it and reinsert to that HTML code with php.

<p>This is my    sentence   <span>and   more</span> also <strong>important</strong> part.</p>

What’s the best method? Using preg_* ? how can i reinsert my text to HTML style ?

for example i want to remove all double or more spaces between words.

preg_replace('/\s+/', ' ', $myText);

but i want just applied in text of my html not html tags, attributes or etc …

Answer 1

Have a look at DomDocument. It’ll allow you to do some manipulation on your HTML.

http://www.php.net/manual/en/domdocument.loadhtml.php

EDIT

If you want to elaborate on exactly what you want to do with your HTML example, we might be able to provide a more specific answer 🙂

EDIT

To reflect the updated answer: the multiple spaces in HTML should collapse anyway, but if you want to remove them then you could try the following:

$result = preg_replace_callback('/(?<=\>)[\w\s]+(?=\<)/', function($match) {
    return preg_filter('/\s+/', ' ', $match[0]);
}, $str);

I’m not a regex expert by any stretch so I’m sure there’s a more elegant way to do this, but this might work for you nonetheless: first do a preg_replace_callback and use lookarounds to grab any text fragments between end and start tags. Then, pass the result through preg_filter (or preg_replace) to replace any multiple spaces as a single space.

Hope this helps/works 🙂