Stripping Only Certain HTML Tags (and contents)

Ok, Ive been trying every way I can think of to do this and nothing is working right with PHP.

I basically want to strip a set of HTML tags from a string while removing the content between those tags and compensating for case and spaces in the tags (such as < img src...>)

strip_tags removes everything except for a whitelist. This is the opposite of what I need. I only want to strip a certain set of tags:

a, img, script, meta, etc

Things like this dont work (obviously)

preg_replace('@<\s*(a|img|script|meta)\b.*?>.*?</\1>@si', '', $htmlstring);


Any help? Please!

Something like that?

Wow! Thanks for the response. That's much closer than I have gotten.

Two issues I see, though.

It's not removing the content between the tags. For example, the anchor text remains when the A tag is stripped.

It doesnt seem to be working on IMG tags - maybe because they dont have closing tags? I can remove the IMGs separately if that is the reason.

Content between the tags... Not sure what you mean there.... As in something like below would get totally stripped out?

<badstuff>You want this removed?</badstuff>

Yes! Exactly like that.

Just remove the \3 in preg_replace, so you're left with single quotes.

Thanks! That part I initially figured out, but there's something funky going on when I apply it to a large chunk of HTML.

When I pass a simple "<a href='blah.php'>anchor text</a>" it works fine. But when I pass in an entire page of code, it leaves the anchor text behind. How odd is that? I'll look into it further.

One thing I forgot to mention..how would I make this case-insenstive since there is no pregi_replace?

Thanks much for you help!

It's already case-insensitive - the 'i' modifier, which is at the end of the expression in the first argument to preg_replace() takes care of that.

Please post the 'code' you're having problems with, since otherwise, it's like peeing in the dark.

Goodnight.

Sorry, I was busy wipe'n up the floor in the bathroom...hehe

All I'm doing to test is pasting in the source from this page:

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/calendar/

Figured out the problem.

I was using htmlspecialchars_decode instead of html_entity_decode

So, I wasn't decoding all the encoded chars after the post/get. Duh......

Thanks liljim!