PHP: remove `http://` from link title

Question

I have a string that looks like:

$string = '<a href="http://google.com">http://google.com</a>';

How can I remove the http:// part from the link text, but leave it in the href attribute?

Answer 1

Without using a full blown parser, this may do the trick for most situations...

$str = '<a href="http://google.com">http://google.com</a>';

$regex = '/(?<!href=["\'])http:\/\//';

$str = preg_replace($regex, '', $str);

var_dump($str); // string(42) "<a href="http://google.com">google.com</a>"

It uses a negative lookbehind to make sure there is no href=" or href=' preceding it.

See it on IDEone.

It also takes into account people who delimit their attribute values with '.

Answer 2

$string = '<a href="http://google.com">http://google.com</a>'; 
$var = str_replace('>http://','>',$string); 

Just tried this in IDEone.com and it has the desired effect.

Answer 3

In this simple case, the preg_replace function will probably work. For more stability, try using DOMDocument:

$string = '<a href="http://google.com">http://google.com</a>';
$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadXML($string);

$link = $dom->firstChild;
$link->nodeValue = str_replace('http://', '', $link->nodeValue);
$string = $dom->saveXML($link);

Answer 4

$str = 'http://www.google.com';
$str = preg_replace('#^https?://#', '', $str);
echo $str; // www.google.com

that will work for both http:// and https://

running live code