CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpregex
Sandip Patel
Sandip Patel

Reputation: 267

Replace alt attriute using preg_replace?

I want to remove alt attribute using preg_replace. Here is the pattern of alt attribute

alt="Screen Shot 2015-06-09 at 11.37.40 AM"

or it might be like this

alt="The Postmates sign outside the office"

There can be any character inside the quotes. I was using following expression:

$html = preg_replace('/alt="\w+\s\w+"/', '><br>', $html);

but it replaces only alt attributes of type:

alt="The Postmates"

What would be the appropriate expression here?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1177

Answers (2)

chris85
chris85

Reputation: 23892

The .*? should do it.

$html = preg_replace('/alt=".*?"/', '<br>', $html);

This will replace everything in alt attribute and its contents with a <br>.

Sidenote a <br> in an img element doesn't make much sense if that's what you are doing... or since you had ><br> maybe you're trying to close the img? Is alt always the last attribute?

The .*? says find anything until the first "this character", in this case a double quote.... In More detail...

. = any character

* = 0 or more occurrences of the preceding character (replace with + if you want atleast one occurrence)

? = makes the * lazy, meaning stop at the first occurrence, not the last

A place to test regexs. http://regex101.com, http://www.phpliveregex.com/

A place to learn regexs, http://www.rexegg.com/, http://www.regular-expressions.info/, and many other sites.

Here's a test you can see this regex work with http://www.phpliveregex.com/p/bvn.

Per your update:

$html = preg_replace('/alt=".*?"\s*/\?s*>/', '><br>', $html);

The /\ is to escape the forward slash because forward slashes are your delimiter. The ? after the forward slash is because it is optional. The \s* is zero or more whitespace. Those could be on either side of the optional closing forward slash which is why we have both.

Upvotes: 2

Yeldar Kurmangaliyev
Yeldar Kurmangaliyev

Reputation: 34189

I am not sure how regexp in PHP differs, but try this one:

$html = preg_replace('~alt\s*=\s*"([^"]*)"~', '><br>', $html);

In the beginning we have alt which is a plain text.
Then \s* means "zero or more spaces". It is done to work on code like alt = "something".
= stands for a plain equals sign.
\s* again.
([^"]*) means "any symbol except for quotes.

Upvotes: 0

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