How to replace spaces inside of HTML tags while keeping the tags in PHP (preg_replace)?

user_1442456 0
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Let's say I have this string:

$string = '<p > ¡Esto es una prueba! < /p > <p> <strong > Prueba 123 </strong> </p> <p> <strong> < a href="https://matricom.net"> MATRICOM < / a> </ strong> </p> <p> <strong > Todas las pruebas aquí ... </strong > < /p>'

What I want to do is fix the HTML tags using PHP (they are malformed due to the spaces). I have tried several different regex expressions that I have found online such as this:

$html = trim(preg_replace('/<\s+>/', '<>', $text));

and:

$html = preg_replace('/<(.+?)(?:»| |″)(.+?)>/', '<\1\2>', $text);

I am attempting to get a string output like this (spaces removed in front part and end part of HTML tags):

'<p> ¡Esto es una prueba! </p> <p> <strong> Prueba 123 </strong> </p> <p> <strong> <a href="https://matricom.net"> MATRICOM </a> </strong> </p> <p> <strong> Todas las pruebas aquí ... </strong> </p>'

Backstory: Google Translate has the tendency to add random spaces in translation results which affect HTML structure. Just looking for a quick way to clean the tags up. I have been searching for two days how to do this and can't seem to find anything that fits quite what I'm looking for.

preg-replace html php regex
2 Answers

In a most general case, you may use a preg_replace_callback solution:

$text='<p > ¡Esto es una prueba! < /p > <p> <strong > Prueba 123 </strong> </p> <p> <strong> <a href="https://matricom.net"> MATRICOM < / a> </ strong> </p> <p> <strong > Todas las pruebas aquí ... </strong > < /p>';
echo preg_replace_callback('~<[^<>]+>~u', function($m) { 
    return str_replace(' ', '', $m[0]); 
  // or,  preg_replace('~\s+~u', '', $m[0]); 
}, $text);

See the PHP demo.

However, you might want to create a pattern to only match the tags that are really used in Google Translate output. For a, p and strong tags it will look like

'~<\s*(?:/\s*)?(?:p|a|strong)\s*>~u'

See this regex demo

Details

  • < - < char
  • \s* - 0+ whitespaces
  • (?:/\s*)? - an optional sequence of / and then 0+ whitespaces
  • (?:p|a|strong) - p, a or strong substrings
  • \s* - 0+ whitespaces
  • > - a > char.
user_38329700

This might be more than you need, but the process to translate HTML files (whether it's by MT or human) involves parsing the HTML through a filter which hides\protects HTML tags from the translation process entirely. The translation editor will only allow the movement of certain tags for linguistic purposes (in your example it could be href). Also, in some languages the bold formatting may not be desirable.

Once post-processed the HTML remains in place as it was with only the textual content changed.

Please note you may find with Google translate that the content of the HTML tags is sometimes also translated, which will cause you all sorts of issues.

I can explain the solution in more detail, just let me know if this is of interest. The tools required can be obtained freely.

user_130502470
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