Convert clickable anchor tags to plain text in html document

Solution 1:

You should be using DOM to parse HTML, not regular expressions...

Edit: Updated code to do simple regex parsing on the href attribute value.

Edit #2: Made the loop regressive so it can handle multiple replacements.

$content = '
<p><a href="http://www.website.com">This is a text link</a></p>
<a href="http://sitename.com/#foo">bah</a>

<a href="#foo">I wont change</a>

';


 $dom = new DOMDocument();
    $dom->loadHTML($content);

    $anchors = $dom->getElementsByTagName('a');
    $len = $anchors->length;

    if ( $len > 0 ) {
        $i = $len-1;
        while ( $i > -1 ) {
        $anchor = $anchors->item( $i );

        if ( $anchor->hasAttribute('href') ) {
            $href = $anchor->getAttribute('href');
            $regex = '/^http/';

            if ( !preg_match ( $regex, $href ) ) { 
            $i--;
            continue;
            }

            $text = $anchor->nodeValue;
            $textNode = $dom->createTextNode( $text );

            $strong = $dom->createElement('strong');
            $strong->appendChild( $textNode );

            $anchor->parentNode->replaceChild( $strong, $anchor );
        }
        $i--;
        }
    }

    echo $dom->saveHTML();
    ?>