How do i form this replacement with regular expression

Question

I need to remove a particular string using php, the string needs to start with <div class='event'> followed by any possible string but which contains $myVariable, which is then followed by </div>. How do I remove all this using preg_replace()? I have worked out it might be something like this

preg_replace("<div class='event'>(.*)" . $myVariable . "(.*)</div>", "", $content);

But I cant get it to work.

Update:

I need to remove a div and everything inside it, the div contains an event name and date but I can only delete the div based on the events name and so the date needs to be defined as practically any string.

You won't get it to work with regex. Please precise what you are trying to achieve. Remove/replace some `
` tag contents? Or just retrieve some value? Please also provide a sample HTML fragment. — Wiktor Stribiżew, Sep 21 '15 at 19:34
What does `$myVariable` contain? Are you sure you need a regex here and not just a simple `str_replace()`? — gen_Eric, Sep 21 '15 at 19:37
If you have nested divs, you're better off with an html parser — Mariano, Sep 21 '15 at 19:46
I need to remove a div and everything inside it, the div contains an event name and date but I can only delete the div based on the events name and so the date needs to be defined as practically any string — user3743076, Sep 21 '15 at 19:56
Where is the event name? Please post a real-life HTML code as an example to see the sample structure of the HTML document you need to remove the `
` from. — Wiktor Stribiżew, Sep 21 '15 at 20:08
Seems like you are trying to parse html with regex http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454 — ford prefect, Sep 21 '15 at 20:53

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 21 '15 at 20:49

Let's imagine you have a <div> and inside it, there is some text node with a specific word you define with $myVariable.

The task is:

Read the document in
Initialize DOM
Collect the <div> tags with .nodeValue containing $myVariable text
Remove those tags from the DOM
Return updated DOM

The code for that algorithm is below (DOM is initialized with a HTML string in the demo):

$html = "<<YOUR_HTML_STRING>>"
$dom = new DOMDocument;               // Declaring the DOM
$dom->loadHTML($html);                // Initializing the DOM with an HTML string
$myVariable = "2015-09-12";           // Your dynamic variable

$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);          // Initializing the DOMXpath
$divs = $xpath->query("//div[contains(.,'$myVariable')]"); // Collecting DIVs 
                                                           // having $myVariable
foreach($divs as $div) { 
   $div->parentNode->removeChild($div); // Removing the DIVs
}

echo $dom->saveHTML();                  //  Getting the updated DOM

See IDEONE demo

Note that you can force DOMDocument to omit adding !DOCTYPE using the following to declare and initialize DOM:

$dom = new DOMDocument('1.0', 'UTF-8');
$dom->loadHTML($html, LIBXML_HTML_NOIMPLIED | LIBXML_HTML_NODEFDTD);

How do i form this replacement with regular expression

1 Answers1