I am looking to remove a chunk out of a string dynamically, from the occurrence of one character <
to the occurrence of another set of 2 characters />>
How about:
$string = "There are many variations of passages of Lorem Ipsum available, but the majority have suffered alteration in some form, by injected humour, or randomised words which don't look even slight...";
$new_string = preg_replace('/<.*?\/>/','',$string);
Still, if you're just parsing html tags, may regexp wouldn't be the best way to go. But if it's just removing some strings, then it may help.