Regex - Match everything except HTML tags

Question

I've searched for this but couldn't find a solution that worked for me. I need regex pattern that will match all text except html tags, so I can make it cyrilic (which would obviously ruin the entire html =))

So, for example:

<p>text1</p>
<p>text2 <span class="theClass">text3</span></p>

I need to match text1, text2, and text3, so something like

preg_match_all("/pattern/", $text, $matches)

and then I would just iterate over the matches, or if it can be done with preg_replace, to replace text1/2/3, with textA/B/C, that would be even better.

Answer 1

As you probably know, regex is not a great choice for this (the general advice here will be to use a Dom parser).

However, if you needed a quick regex solution, you use this (see demo):

<[^>]*>(*SKIP)(*F)|[^<]+

How this works is that on the left the <[^>]*> matches complete <tags>, then the (*SKIP)(*F) causes the regex to fail and the engine to advance to the position in the string that follows the last character of the matched tag.

This is an application of a general technique to exclude patterns from matches (read the linked question for more details).

If you don't want to allow the matches to span several lines, add \r\n to the negated character class that does your matching, like so:

<[^>]*>(*SKIP)(*F)|[^<\r\n]+

Answer 2

How about this RegEx:

/(?<=>)[\w\s]+(?=<)/g

Online Demo