Question

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How to parse HTML with PHP?

I would be most grateful if a regex master among you would be kind enough to help me.

I’d like to make a php function that converts html tags/elements, as per the following:

I want to convert

<span class="heading1">Any generic text, or other html elements such as <p> tags</p> in here</span>

To

<h1 class="heading1">Any text, or other html elements such as <p> tags</p> in here</h1>

…So basically I want to convert the span headings to proper h1 tags (this is for the purpose of better SEO) but there could be other normal span tags that I want to preserve.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Well, as the commenters above pointed out, it’s probably not a good idea. However, since this case is extremely simple, the regex would be pretty easy if you want to live on the edge:

preg_replace('/<(\/*)span/', '<${1}h1', $htmlFile);

This will replace all span tags with h1 tags. Note that if there is any deviation from the format, it will break. Hence the warnings against this method. I would only recommend it if you are working with a small number of relatively small HTML files, so you can check them for errors.

EDIT: Yeah, if you only want to replace ones with class="heading1" I’m not touching it. That would require more mucking about with the regex than it would probably take to just fix all the files manually.

EDIT 2: Okay, I’m a little bored and curious, so I’m going to see if I can come up with a regex that would replace all class="heading1" spans and their corresponding closing tags with h1’s:

preg_replace('/<span class="heading1">(.*(.*<span.*>.*<\/span>.*)*.*)<\/span>/', '<h1 class="heading1">${1}</h1>', $htmlFile);

If my calculations are correct, this should ignore any matching sets of span tags inside the heading1 span tags.

You’re still probably better off using a DOM parser though.