preg_replace is replacing matches including content contained within

Question

I am using preg_replace to replace HTML comment tags with empty space but it seems to be replacing the whole HTML comment with empty space.

    echo preg_replace('/<!--(.*?)-->/','',$r->pageCont);

Where $r->pageCont is a database entry containing HTML, for example:

    <div class="col-lg-12">
    <p>The year is:</p>
    <!-- <?php echo date(Y); ?> -->
    </div>

In the above example, the HTML comment tags would be stripped away leaving only the PHP code to echo the year. Like I said, what is happening is the entire HTML comment is being stripped away.

Can someone recommend a pattern to use? Would appreciate your input.

EDIT: updated question to reflect the code I am using.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags — Micha Wiedenmann, Sep 22 '14 at 06:42
@AvinashRaj I have tried changing the operator to .*? and .+ but to no avail. — TimD, Sep 22 '14 at 06:50
see here http://regex101.com/r/sT0fL2/1 your regex remove the comment line only. Did you want to replace `` with `` ?, if yes then your replacement string would be `$1`. see http://regex101.com/r/sT0fL2/2 — Avinash Raj, Sep 22 '14 at 07:15
@AvinashRaj Yes I want to remove the HTML comments so the PHP tags remain. I apologise if this was not clear in my question. — TimD, Sep 22 '14 at 07:20

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 22 '14 at 07:24

0

It seems like you're trying to replace the comment line with the php code present inside that. If yes, then you need to put the replacement string as $1 so that it would refer to the group index 1.

echo preg_replace('/<!--(.*?)-->/', '$1', $r->pageCont);

DEMO

answered Sep 22 '14 at 07:24

Avinash Raj

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Thank you for your help. However, while it did solve my objective by stripping away the HTML comment tags, it did not solve my goal to execute the PHP code within the HTML comments. – TimD Sep 22 '14 at 08:08
i think this solevs the current question. If you have any other doubts then ask it as another question. – Avinash Raj Sep 22 '14 at 08:10

preg_replace is replacing matches including content contained within

1 Answers1