CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpregexwordpress
Dylan Cross
Dylan Cross

Reputation: 5986

Regular Expression remove [caption]

I am trying to remove some html from my string of text which comes from a Wordpress generated database.

I want this:

Marnie Stanton led us through the process first and then everyone went crazy. 
[caption id="attachment_76" align="alignnone" width="191"] One of the work stations[/caption]
[caption id="attachment_78" align="alignnone" width="300"] The group is getting some great results[/caption]
[caption id="attachment_83" align="alignnone" width="224"] You can see the prints multiplying[/caption]

to turn into this:

Marnie Stanton led us through the process first and then everyone went crazy.

So what I want is everything from the first [caption] to the very last [/caption] to be removed.

I have started with this:

(\[caption\s+?[^]]+\])

Which only removes the first tag.

Upvotes: 4

Views: 3100

Answers (4)

Cody
Cody

Reputation: 21

[caption] is an example of a shortcode. You can remove all shortcodes with Wordpress' strip_shortcodes(); function.

$text = 'Marnie Stanton led us through the process first and then everyone went crazy. 
[caption id="attachment_76" align="alignnone" width="191"] One of the work stations[/caption]
[caption id="attachment_78" align="alignnone" width="300"] The group is getting some great results[/caption]
I want to keep this !
[caption id="attachment_83" align="alignnone" width="224"] You can see the prints multiplying[/caption]';

$text = strip_shortcodes($text);
echo $text;

This will output:

Marnie Stanton led us through the process first and then everyone went crazy.I want to keep this !

[caption] documentation

strip_shortcodes documentation

Upvotes: 1

HamZa
HamZa

Reputation: 14921

You may want to use something like this

$string = 'Marnie Stanton led us through the process first and then everyone went crazy. 
[caption id="attachment_76" align="alignnone" width="191"] One of the work stations[/caption]
[caption id="attachment_78" align="alignnone" width="300"] The group is getting some great results[/caption]
I want to keep this !
[caption id="attachment_83" align="alignnone" width="224"] You can see the prints multiplying[/caption]';

$new_string = preg_replace('#\s*\[caption[^]]*\].*?\[/caption\]\s*#is', '', $string);
echo $new_string;

Output:

Marnie Stanton led us through the process first and then everyone went crazy.I want to keep this !

Explanation:

  • Modifiers is : i means match case insensitive, s means match new lines with dots .
  • \s* : match white spaces 0 or more times
  • \[caption : match [caption
  • [^]]* : match anything except ] 0 or more times
  • \] : match ]
  • .*?\[/caption\] : match anything until [/caption] found (and match [/caption])
  • \s* : match white spaces 0 or more times

Online demo

Upvotes: 10

user229044
user229044

Reputation: 239290

It seems like you can explode the string by newlines, and just take the first line...

<?php

$str = <<<EOD
Marnie Stanton led us through the process first and then everyone went crazy.
[caption id="attachment_76" align="alignnone" width="191"] One of the work stations[/caption]
[caption id="attachment_78" align="alignnone" width="300"] The group is getting some great results[/caption]
[caption id="attachment_83" align="alignnone" width="224"] You can see the prints multiplying[/caption]
EOD;

$lines = explode("\n", trim($str));

echo $lines[0]; # Marnie Stanton led us through the process first and then everyone went crazy.

Upvotes: 0

jeroen
jeroen

Reputation: 91734

As it seems you just want the start of the string, I would not use a regular expression but string functions:

$pos = stripos($your_string, '[caption');
$result = substr($your_string, 0, $pos);

Upvotes: 1

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