Function to remove middle characters?

Hi all. 

Is there a function.. or easy way.. to completely remove a line from my description?  For example: 

I want to remove any instances of

<img src= * />

  anywhere it is found in $description. 

That is.. anything in between the beginning tag and end tag, I want removed. 

Thank you!

Try preg_replace() .... http://ca2.php.net/manual/en/function.preg-replace.php

Something like this:

$text = preg_replace('/<img [^>]*>/', '', $text);

preg_replace looks to be just what I need.  However, as I'm stripping this from an rss feed, the syntax is slightly different and I'm having trouble making it work.  I've looked up preg_replace on a couple sites but it's a bit confusing!  Here's an example of a line I'm trying to remove:

<img src="http://someurl.com/img1.gif" />

So I'm trying this:

$text = preg_replace('<img src=&quot [^>]*/>', '', $text);

No luck yet.  Can you spot what I'm doing wrong? 

Error:  Unknown modifier 'q' in ... 

Thanks again. 

I'm much closer. 

$text = preg_replace('/<img [^>]*\/>/', '', $text);

works, but... 

It will parse all the page code and take everything out in $text until it reaches the very last closing tag (removing a couple paragraphs I want to keep).  I want it to only remove what it finds up to the img closing tag. 

Thoughts? 

The problem is the [^>]* bit, which tells the regex to keep reading characters that are NOT >. Since you don't have > in your text, it just keeps reading characters.

To solve this, I believe you will need to use a lookahead assertion. http://www.php.net/manual/en/regexp.reference.assertions.php

$text = preg_replace('/<img .*(?!\/>)\/>/', '', $text);

Lookaheads will make the regex much slower. Maybe there is a better way to do this.

The problem is the [^>]* bit, which tells the regex to keep reading characters that are NOT >. Since you don't have > in your text, it just keeps reading characters.

 

To solve this, I believe you will need to use a lookahead assertion. http://www.php.net/manual/en/regexp.reference.assertions.php

 

$text = preg_replace('/<img .*(?!\/>)\/>/', '', $text);

 

Lookaheads will make the regex much slower. Maybe there is a better way to do this.

Not sure what you mean by decoding it.  I'm pretty new to php.  I'm just trying to clean this up from an rss feed.  Be glad to give it a try though it you point me in the right direction. 

*coughungreedy*

#<img .*?/>#

*coughungreedy*

#<img .*?/>#

Knew there was a better way.

*coughungreedy*

#<img .*?/>#

Yes!  Thank you to you and Mike.  You both were a big help. 

Could you explain the # symbol?  That surprised me since I don't see it in the code anywhere. 

or

<?php
$text = 'bla <img src="http://someurl.com/img1.gif" /> bla ';
$text = htmlspecialchars_decode($text);
$text = preg_replace('/<img [^>]*>/', '', $text);
echo $text;
?>

or

<?php
$text = 'bla <img src="http://someurl.com/img1.gif" /> bla ';
$text = htmlspecialchars_decode($text);
$text = preg_replace('/<img [^>]*>/', '', $text);
echo $text;
?>

Holy smokes!  I spent the next 3 hours last night building an array to strip the above tag and the many others I was finding...  with plans to continue today and then find this post and realize that...

$text = htmlspecialchars_decode($text);

was all that was needed!  It took care of formatting everything!  It's all good though... learned some new things. 

A huge thanks!