Question

I’m got a bunch of html code like this:

<a href="http://example.com/project-a" title="Project A (test)">Project A (test</span></a>
<a href="http://example.com/project-b" title="Project B (test)">Project B (test</span></a>
<a href="http://example.com/project-c" title="Project C (test)">Project C (test</span></a>
<a href="http://example.com/project-d" title="Project D (test)">Project D (test</span></a>

You can see at the end of each line it’s got:

(test</span></a>

I’d like to change this opening-bracket to a:

<span class="example">

However, you can see there are other opening-brackets on each line, so I guess the criteria is the first opening-bracket before the closing span tag needs to be changed.

Is there a way to do this with regex and php?

Answer 1

Well, if it always looks like this, you can just use:

str_replace(' (test</span>', ' <span class="example">test</span>', $string)

Or, if it’s not always “test” 🙂

preg_replace('/ \((.*?)<\/span>/', ' <span class="example">$1</span>', $string)