How to remove empty html tags (which contain whitespaces and/or their html codes)

Question

Need a regex for preg_replace.

This question wasn't answered in "another question" because not all tags I want to remove aren't empty.

I have not only to remove empty tags from an HTML structure, but also tags containing line breaks as well as white spaces and/or their html code.

Possible Codes are:

<br />     &ensp; &emsp;      

BEFORE removing matching tags:

<div> 
  <h1>This is a html structure.</h1> 
  <p>This is not empty.</p> 
  <p></p> 
  <p><br /></p>
  <p> <br /> &;thinsp;</p>
  <p>&nbsp;</p> 
  <p> &nbsp; </p> 
</div>

AFTER removing matching tags:

<div> 
  <h1>This is a html structure.</h1> 
  <p>This is not empty.</p> 
</div>

possible duplicate of Regex to remove empty html tags, that contains only empty children — Saty
– Saty, Commented Jun 16, 2015 at 10:51

karthik manchala · Accepted Answer · 2015-06-16 10:55:24Z

8

You can use the following:

<([^>\s]+)[^>]*>(?:\s*(?:<br \/>|&nbsp;|&thinsp;|&ensp;|&emsp;|&#8201;|&#8194;|&#8195;)\s*)*<\/\1>

And replace with '' (empty string)

See DEMO

Note: This will also work for empty html tags with attributes.

answered Jun 16, 2015 at 10:55

karthik manchala

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3 Comments

Leonardo Jorge Over a year ago

Hi, i update your test and fails when added empty spaces inside of a tag. Here's the link with error and this other link is with the adjust. You just missed before closing the capture group this | )\s*|\s*)

SteveVg Over a year ago

This is a great answer, but should be updated to this in order to deal with these two cases: <br> and <br/>

General Omosco Over a year ago

To exclude tags like iframe, canvas, etc

preg_replace('~<((?!iframe|canvas)\w+)[^>]*>(?:\s*(?:<br \/>|&nbsp;|&thinsp;|&ensp;|&emsp;|&#8201;|&#8194;|&#8195;)\s*)*<\/\1>~iu', "", $html)

Identity1 · Accepted Answer · 2015-06-16 10:59:22Z

Use tidy It uses the following function:

function cleaning($string, $tidyConfig = null) {
    $out = array ();
    $config = array (
            'indent' => true,
            'show-body-only' => false,
            'clean' => true,
            'output-xhtml' => true,
            'preserve-entities' => true 
    );
    if ($tidyConfig == null) {
        $tidyConfig = &$config;
    }
    $tidy = new tidy ();
    $out ['full'] = $tidy->repairString ( $string, $tidyConfig, 'UTF8' );
    unset ( $tidy );
    unset ( $tidyConfig );
    $out ['body'] = preg_replace ( "/.*<body[^>]*>|<\/body>.*/si", "", $out ['full'] );
    $out ['style'] = '<style type="text/css">' . preg_replace ( "/.*<style[^>]*>|<\/style>.*/si", "", $out ['full'] ) . '</style>';
    return ($out);
}

Igbanam · Accepted Answer · 2015-06-16 11:24:17Z

0

I'm not so good with regex but, try this

\<.*\>\s*\&.*sp;\s*\<\/.*\>|\<.*\>\s*\<\s*br\s*\/\>\s*\&.*sp;\s*\<\/.*\>|\<.*\>\s*\&.*sp;\s*\<\s*br\s*\/\>\<\/.*\>

Basically matches

Tags with HTML space elements in them OR
Tags with breaks occurring before HTML space elements in them
Tags with breaks occurring after HTML space elements in them

answered Jun 16, 2015 at 11:24

Igbanam

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