Remove anchors from text

Question

I need to remove anchor tags from some text, and can\'t seem to be able to do it using regex.
Just the anchor tags, not their content.
For instance,

Answer 1

This question has been answered already but I thought I would add my solution to the mix. I like this better than the accepted solution because its a bit more to the point.

$content = 
    preg_replace(array('"<a href(.*?)>"', '"</a>"'), array('',''), $content);

Answer 2

Then you can try

preg_replace('/<\/?a[^>]*>/','',$Source);

I tried it online here on rubular

Answer 3

You are looking for strip_tags().

<?php

// outputs 'google'
echo strip_tags('<a href="http://www.google.com/" target="_blank">google</a>');

Answer 4

using regex:

preg_replace('/<a[^>]+>([^<]+)<\/a>/i','\1',$html);

Answer 5

Have a try with:

$str = '<p>paragraph</p><a href="http://www.google.com/" target="_blank" title="<>">google -> foo</a><div>In the div</div>';
// first, extract anchor tag
preg_match("~<a .*?</a>~", $str, $match);
// then strip the HTML tags
echo strip_tags($match[0]),"\n";

output:

google -> foo

Answer 6

Exactly, it cannot be done properly using a regular expression.

Here is an example using DOM :

$xml = new DOMDocument(); 
$xml->loadHTML($html); 

$links = $xml->getElementsByTagName('a');

//Loop through each <a> tags and replace them by their text content    
for ($i = $links->length - 1; $i >= 0; $i--) {
    $linkNode = $links->item($i);
    $lnkText = $linkNode->textContent;
    $newTxtNode = $xml->createTextNode($lnkText);
    $linkNode->parentNode->replaceChild($newTxtNode, $linkNode);
}

It's important to loop backward whenever changes will be made to the DOM.