Question

What’s the best way to remove these tags from a string, to prepare it for being passed to eval() ?

for eg. the string can be something like this:

<?php
  echo 'hello world';
  ?>
  Hello Again
  <?php

  echo 'Bye';
?>

Obviously str_replace won’t work because the two php tags in the middle need to be there (the the 1st and the last need to be removed)

Answer 1

Sounds like a bad idea, but if you want the start and end ones removed you could do

$removedPhpWrap = preg_replace('/^<\?php(.*)(\?>)?$/s', '$1', $phpCode);

This should do it (not tested).

Please tell me also why you want to do it, I’m 95% sure there is a better way.