PHP RegEx (or Alt Method) for Anchor tags

PHPregex

Ok I have to parse out a SOAP request and in the request some of the values are passed with (or inside) a Anchor tag. Looking for a RegEx (or alt method) to strip the tag and just return the value.

// But item needs to be a RegEx of some sort, it's a field right now
if($sObject->list == 'item') {
   // Split on > this should be the end of the right side of the anchor tag
   $pieces = explode(">", $sObject->fields->$field);

   // Split on < this should be the closing anchor tag
   $piece = explode("<", $pieces[1]);

   $fields_string .= $piece[0] . "\n";
}

item is a field name but I would like to make this a RegEx to check for the Anchor tag instead of a specific field.

Best Answer

PHP has a strip_tags() function.

Alternatively you can use filter_var() with FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING.

Whatever you do don't parse HTML/XML with regular expressions. It's really error-prone and flaky. PHP has at least 3 different parsers as standard (SimpleXML, DOMDocument and XMLReader spring to mind).

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