how to remove a tag and its contents using regular expression?

Question

$str = \'some text tag contents more text \';

My questions are: How to retrieve content tag contents which is between

Answer 1

For removal I ended up just using this:

$str = preg_replace('~~Usi', "", $str);

Using ~ instead of / for the delimiter solved errors being thrown because of the backslash in the end tag, which seemed to be an issue even with escaping. Eliminating > from the opening tag allows for attributes or other characters and still gets the tag and all of its contents.

This only works where nesting is not a concern.

The Usi modifiers mean U = Ungreedy, s = include linebreak characters, i = case insensitive.