You can not do this using a simple regex alone, but you can use a regex to find the paranthesis blocks as follwing
function process_paranthesis($match) {
return strip_tags($match[1]);
}
$string = '<table><tr>Hello { <strong>name</strong>}</tr></table>';
echo preg_replace_callback("/\{([^\}]*)\}/", "process_paranthesis",$string);
The RegEx was modified to just find all {...}-blocks and we use preg_replace_callback()
, which calls a function that computes the string that the match is to be replaced to. The parameter $match of the callback function contains information about the match in various ways. $match[0] contains the whole text of the match and $match[1] contains the text within the first paranthesis within the match.
The function strip_tags()
is then used within the callback function, to remove all HTML-Tags. This is a predefined function and should be used instead of reinventing the wheel.
The RegEx is constructed as following:
- A match starts with a
{
and ends with a }
; we need to escape it so we use \{
...\}
.
- We want to process everything, but the surrounding
{
and }
, so we put round paranthesis inside: \{(
...)\}
and will then get the whole content within the curly braces as $match[1] without further need to remove those curly braces by using other string functions.
- We want to allow all characters between the
{
and }
except for the }
itself; we use [^\}]
, which matches every kind of character but }
; and we want to allow multiple of them, resulting in: [^\}]*
NOTE: .*
is greedy. So, if we just use .*
instead of [^\}]*
we would get weird results in case there are multiple blocks of curly braces. The match would start at the first opening {
and end at the last }
within the string and would containing all blocks and everything between it. This would match like this: "Text {in first} something between {and second one}
. And some more." -- But we want it to match like this: "Text {in first}
something between {and second one}
. And some more.", right?