正则表达式与HTML子元素匹配html元素[重复]

Question

Possible Duplicate:
How to parse and process HTML with PHP?

I wasn't sure how to phrase this question.

Basically I have this php code:

$new_html = preg_replace('!<div.*?id="spotlight".*?>.*?</div>!is', '', $html);

I want this to change html code from this (example, not actual html):

<div id="container">
    <div id="spotlight">
        <!-- empty -->
    </div>
    <div id="content">
        <!-- lots of content -->
    </div>
</div>

To this:

<div id="container">
    <div id="content">
        <!-- lots of content -->
    </div>
</div>

As you can see the php code will do this successfully, because the regex is looking for:

<div{anything}id="spotlight"{anything}>{anything}</div>

However

if the div id="spotlight" contains a child div like so:

<div id="container">
    <div id="spotlight">
        <div></div>
    </div>
    <div id="content">
        <!-- lots of content -->
    </div>
</div>

then the regex will match the end div tag of the child div!

How do i prevent this? How to i tell regex to ignore the closing div if another div was opened?

Thanks

Answer 1

Use DOMDocument:

$html = '<div id="container">
    <div id="spotlight">
        <!-- empty -->
    </div>
    <div id="content">
        <!-- lots of content -->
    </div>
</div>';

$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadXML($html);

$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);
$query = '//div[@id="spotlight"]';
$entries = $xpath->query($query);

foreach($entries as $one){

    $one->parentNode->removeChild($one);
}

echo $dom->saveHTML();

Codepad Example