Question

Is it possible to convert the first block a text to the second block of text using PHP? If so, how? Thanks

<div>
 <p>Some text & a <a href="http://abc.com/index.php?x=123&y=abc">link</a>. Done</p>
 <p>More text & a <a href="http://abc.com/index.php?x=123&y=abc">link</a>. Done</p>
</div>


<div>
 <p>Some text & a <strong>link</strong> <i>(http://abc.com/index.php?x=123&y=abc)</i>. Done</p>
 <p>More text & a <strong>link</strong> <i>(http://abc.com/index.php?x=123&y=abc)</i>. Done</p>
</div>

EDIT. Per Andy’s recommendation, looking at something like the following. Still struggling on the converting of links, but it looks like a good start.

libxml_use_internal_errors(true);   //Temporarily disable errors resulting from improperly formed HTML
$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTML($array['message_text']);
$a = $doc->getElementsByTagName('a');
foreach ($a as $link)
{
    //Where do I go from here?
}
$array['message_text'] = $doc->saveHTML();
libxml_use_internal_errors(false);

Answer 1

First off, your HTML is malformed, as & needs to be encoded as its HTML entity &. Fixing this gives us:

$html = '<div>
 <p>Some text &amp; a <a href="http://abc.com/index.php?x=123&amp;y=abc">link</a>. Done</p>
 <p>More text &amp; a <a href="http://abc.com/index.php?x=123&amp;y=abc">link</a>. Done</p>
</div>';

From here, you shouldn’t use a regex. It is incredibly brittle and not meant for parsing HTML. Instead, you can use PHP’s DOMDocument class to parse the HTML, extract the <a> tags, pull the information you want from them, create the new HTML elements, and insert them into the appropriate place.

$doc = new DOMDocument;
$doc->loadHTML( $html);

$xpath = new DOMXPath($doc);
foreach( $xpath->query( '//a') as $a) {
    $strong = $doc->createElement( 'strong', $a->textContent);
    $i = $doc->createElement( 'i', htmlentities( $a->getAttribute('href')));
    $a->parentNode->insertBefore( $strong, $a);
    $a->parentNode->insertBefore( $i, $a);
    $a->parentNode->removeChild( $a);
}

This prints:

<p>Some text &amp; a <strong>link</strong><i>http://abc.com/index.php?x=123&amp;y=abc</i>. Done</p> 
<p>More text &amp; a <strong>link</strong><i>http://abc.com/index.php?x=123&amp;y=abc</i>. Done</p>