RegEx Not Working As Expected When Put Into Preg_Replace

Question

I want to remove the following - title=\"huluId-581956\" - from a string so that:

<a title=\"huluId-581956\" href="somelink">My Link</a>

becomes

<a href="somelink">My Link</a>

I'm basically looking to take the title attribute out. I finessed my exp on regexpal and put it into preg_replace as such:

$myString ='<a title=\"huluId-581956\" href="somelink">My Link</a>';

$myString = preg_replace('/(title=\\)("huluId-)[0-9]+\\(")/', '', $myString);
$myString = preg_replace('/(title=\\)("huluId-)[0-9]+(\\")/', '', $myString);

But although on regexpal I have no problem selecting the title attribute, when I place the expression into preg_replace it does NOT work.

Any help would be greatly appreciated as I have no idea why this would be so.

Thank you!

Well, the variable you're wanting to replace from is $html, but you put the contents in $myString. If not that, maybe too many \ . And perhaps you could use an XML parser to pull the attribute out, just in case your <a> is less well behaved in the future? — bishop
– bishop, Commented Jan 16, 2014 at 3:17
Sorry, that was a mistake I put when shortening the thing for posting. I corrected it now. It obviously should be $myString. As for the XML parse could you please explain further - I have no experience in that dept. Thanks — Noodle Head
– Noodle Head, Commented Jan 16, 2014 at 3:25

Enissay · Accepted Answer · 2014-01-16 03:30:35Z

2

Simply use this instead:

$myString = preg_replace('/\s+title=\\\\"[^"]+"/', '', $html);

Also, since I don't know in what context you're using this, maybe consider using a DOM parser because regex is not the appropriate tool for HTML parsing... A DOM parser like PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser can do that easily...

Working DEMO

edited Jan 16, 2014 at 3:30

answered Jan 16, 2014 at 3:24

Enissay

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3 Comments

Enissay Over a year ago

@mikevoermans, corrected, you must use 3 slaches to escape the 4th xD

Noodle Head Over a year ago

Does not work. $myString = '<a title=\"huluId-581956\" href=\"hulu.com\" rel=\"nofollow\">asdfasdf</a>'; $clean_html = preg_replace('/\s+title=\\"[^"]+"/', '', $myString); echo $clean_html;

Noodle Head Over a year ago

Thank you very much. Yep, that did it. Aha - I see... Thanks I will try. I get this html as a long string stored in $myString

mikevoermans · Accepted Answer · 2014-01-16 03:24:07Z

0

The slashes are messing up the regex - strip them out and it makes life easier.

$myString ='<a title=\"huluId-581956" href="somelink">My Link</a>';
$myString = stripslashes($myString);
$myString = preg_replace('/title="huluId-[0-9]+" /', '', $myString);
echo $myString;

answered Jan 16, 2014 at 3:24

mikevoermans

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1 Comment

Noodle Head Over a year ago

Hi - this is part of a much longer string and I cannot mess with it, except of course for deleting the title attribute. Yes, if the backslashes were not there it would be much simpler, but as such, they must be. Unless you know of a way of stripping the backslashes ONLY for that section - the title tag.

Patrick Bard · Accepted Answer · 2014-01-16 03:56:58Z

0

Considering that you will normally have the slash after "title" you can have a simpler regex:

/title=\\"(.)*?"/

It selects everything after 'title=\"', and the "?" make it ends on the next character, which is a quotation mark.

The code:

$myString ='<a title=\"huluId-581956\" href="somelink">My Link</a>';

$myString = preg_replace('/title=\\"(.)*?"/', '', $myString);

edited Jan 16, 2014 at 3:56

answered Jan 16, 2014 at 3:38

Patrick Bard

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