Question

I’ve written a regular expression to strip out BBCode tags – it just strips the allowed tags out (for later counting the string length without the tags).

I’m not an expert when it comes to regular expressions – so after an hour I found this pretty much working:

$pattern = "/\[\/?(i|b|u|url(.*?)|list|li)[\]\[]*\]/i";
$stripped = preg_replace($pattern, '', $text);

It only strips the allowed six tags (and no more – which it is supposed to) and the special tag ‘url’ which can be extended like ‘url=http://someurl‘.

I.e.

in:  [url=someurl]Lorem[/url] ipsum [test]dolor[/test] sit [b]amet[/b].
out: Lorem ipsum [test]dolor[/test] sit amet.

But the problem is, that it doesn’t just strip out ‘url=[sometext]’ but also ‘urlipsum’.
I tried to add an ‘=’ for parsing but couldn’t get to the point.

Does anyone has a hint for me how to only strip out url when it comes with the =?

Answer 1

Try:

$pattern = '/\[\/?(i|b|u|url(=[^\]]+)?|list|li)[\]\[]*\]/i';