在PHP中使用Regex删除空白标签

Question

Is it possible to remove all the blank <a> tags in some HTML code using regex?

For example,

<a href="this-goes-somewhere.com" rel="external"></a>
<a href="go-to-that-page.html"></a>
<a href="this-should-stay.html">This Should Stay</a>
<a href="this-should-stay.html"><img src="kitten.jpg"/></a>

In this case, the regex should remove the first two links. I used <a(.*?)></a> to achieve this but it matches all four links.

Any help would be appreciated.

I thought ? was meant to stop at minimum possible number of characters.

UPDATE: The HTML will not be invalid, I am generating it myself. Using Regex will be much easier in this particular case, in my opinion.

Answer 1

I modified your regex so that it would only match the first two links by changing .* to [^<]: https://regex101.com/r/nhu2T7/2

This PHP code will run that regex and print out the result:

<?php

$re = '/(<a[^<]*?><\/a>)/m';
$str = '<a href="this-goes-somewhere.com" rel="external"></a>
<a href="go-to-that-page.html"></a>
<a href="this-should-stay.html">This Should Stay</a>
<a href="this-should-stay.html"><img src="kitten.jpg"/></a>';

echo preg_replace($re, '', $str);

Result:

<a href="this-should-stay.html">This Should Stay</a>
<a href="this-should-stay.html"><img src="kitten.jpg"/></a>

Execute at: http://sandbox.onlinephpfunctions.com/code/dd2b986b80ac6a2c7fd173f65070dd2ce1d78d3c