Question

I’m terrible at writing regular expressions so am looking for some help.

I have the following string:

<li class="current-menu-item"><a title="Site Name" href="http://www.example.com/">Home</a></li>

An want to replace the hyperlink with a H1.

Is there a simple way to do this using regular expressions, bearing in mind the title, hyperlink and anchor text change?

Answer 1

preg_replace('/<a[^>]*>(\w+)<\/a>/', '<h1>$1</h1>', $subject);

‘]’ will match all characters except ‘>’, ‘*’ means it will match zero or more occurences of character(s) in front of it, then ‘>’ will be after that, then it will capture everything inside (), ‘\w’ will match any word character, + will match at least one occurence of character in front of it and then ” will appear (forward slashes need to be escaped).

$subject could be whole HTML document or just your string.