I have some HTML ordered/ unordered list in HTML. As I want to export it to a txt file, I need to convert it to plain text.
eg. Original HTML:
<ol><li>Item 1</li></li>Item 2</li><li>Item 3</li></ol>
I want to change it to
1. Item 1
2. Item 2
3. Item 3
I searched on StackOverflow but only found a solution of the opposite conversion. A regex that converts text lists to html in PHP
Is there any ways I can handle it? Thanks!
You can simply replace the tags you do not need and explode it on a tag that will return itself for every row.
<?php
$html = '
<ol>
<li>Item 1</li>
<li>Item 2</li>
<li>Item 3</li>
</ol>
';
$html = str_replace(['<ol>', '</ol>', '</li>'], '', $html);
$html = explode('<li>', $html);
print_r($html);
I think it's a little more complicated than just regex, especially if you want to add the numbers in front. But this little piece of code wil translate <ol><li>Item 1</li></li>Item 2</li><li>Item 3</li></ol>
to
* Item 1
* Item 2
* Item 3
<?php
$string = "<ol><li>Item 1</li><li>Item 2</li><li>Item 3</li></ol>";
$string= preg_replace("/<li>/", " * ", $string);
$string= preg_replace("/<\/li>/", "\n", $string);
$string= preg_replace("/<\/?ol>/", "", $string);
echo $string;
Please have a look html2text library. It has different methods to convert your HTML string into plain text.
I think we need to remember here that the numbers mentioned in the LI tags aren't to be used as a reference as they might be "donkey", "lamb", "monkey".
My solution matches anything inside the LI tags and then loops on the matches to create the item numbers.
The preg_match_all will create an array with sub-arrays. The first contains the whole match including the LI tags and the second will just match whatever was found inside the (.*?) non-greedy area.
I have used \n as a line break but if it was HTML output that would be a BR tag obviously
$str = "<ol><li>Monkey</li></li><li>Lamb</li><li>Elephant</li></ol>";
preg_match_all("/<li>(.*?)<\/li>/i",$str,$matches);
if(count($matches[1])>0){
foreach($matches[1] as $k=>$v){
echo ($k+1).". $v\n";
}
}