从特定文本的字符串中删除链接

Question

I want to remove links (keeping text) from a string only if the text inside the link match exactly a term.

I'm not sure what's wrong with this regexp, but it strips out a lot of text.

$terms = ["justo pulvinar"];
$string = "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Sed <a href=\"#/app/292\">quam nibh, faucibus</a> quam nibh, faucibus eget tortor eget, finibus semper justo. aliquet <a href=\"#/app/212\">justo pulvinar</a>, elit.";
foreach ($terms as $term) {
    $string = preg_replace('/<a href=\"(.*?)\">('.$term.')<\/a>/', "\\2",$string);
 }
echo $string;

Edit maybe I wasn't clear enough, I have a $terms array for a reason: I want to remove from $string links that match exactly those terms, not all links.

Answer 1

Everything looks okay except your replacement operation. This one works for me:

$string = preg_replace('/<a [^>]*>'.$term.'<\/a>/', $term, $string)

Here, we are matching an <a and all characters after it which are not > because the attributes of the a tag are not relevant for the operation. Then we want to see the term we're working on, and a closing a tag.

Replace all of that with just the term. I'm not using backreferences because there should be no variance in the string values. A scenario where backreferences might be useful is if case were variable and needed to be preserved.