Strip closing php tag using perl regex

Question

I have php file, and I want to remove closing tag (?>), but only if it is last closing tag and there is nothing after.

<?php
  //some code
?>
<?php
  //some other code
?> // <- this and only this should be removed

I have tried pattern 's/(\s*\?>\s*)$//s' and several of its mutations, but with no success: they remove all occurrences of ?>, breaking the code, and I don't know how to match EOF.

(Yes, I know a workaround: using e.g. tail -1 to check only last line of file, but it would complicate my whole code-formatting script, so if the problem can be resolved with properly constructed regex, it would be great.)

Your regex should work - but only if you read the entire file content into one variable - and then parse it. If you use something like perl -p -i -e 's/(\s*\?>\s*)$//' filename.php, then each line is processed one at a time. Obviously, this will strip all occurrences. — Aleks G
– Aleks G, Commented Sep 29, 2011 at 11:01

Aleks G · Accepted Answer · 2011-09-29 11:14:43Z

2

I now had a chance to test it. Reading all file does work. This perl code worked for me:

local $/;
open FH, "<", "tmp.php";
$var = <FH>;
print "$var\n\n";
close FH;
$var =~ s/(\s*\?>\s*)$//s;
print "$var\n";

on the following php code:

<?php
//some code
?>
<?php
//some other code
?>

answered Sep 29, 2011 at 11:14

Aleks G

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1 Comment

mc.watras Over a year ago

It works: perl -pi -w -0777 -e 's/(\s*\?>\s*)$/;/s' file.php (argument -0777 for one-liner causes reading file as one string). Additionally, I have found that replacing ?> by empty string may cause syntax errors e.g. for such line: `<?php echo 'a' ?>. Replacing with ';' is safe. Thanks everybody.

Tom Wright · Accepted Answer · 2011-09-29 10:59:46Z

0

OK, let's break this down.

You want to match '?>', so we'll start with ('?>'), but since '?' has special meaning in regex, we need to escape it: ('\?>').

We don't care about what's before the closing tag, but we want to make sure nothing (except whitespace) is after it. You were pretty much on the money with this: we need \s and $. I'd do it like this:

('\?>')\s*$

Hope that works for you.

answered Sep 29, 2011 at 10:59

Tom Wright

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1 Comment

alex Over a year ago

\w is a word character, not whitespace. You want \s.

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