Remove everything within script and style tags

Do not use RegEx on HTML. PHP provides a tool for parsing DOM structures, called appropriately DomDocument.

<?php
// some HTML for example
$myHtml = '<html><head><script>alert("hi mom!");</script></head><body><style>body { color: red;} </style><h1>This is some content</h1><p>content is awesome</p></body><script src="someFile.js"></script></html>';

// create a new DomDocument object
$doc = new DOMDocument();

// load the HTML into the DomDocument object (this would be your source HTML)
$doc->loadHTML($myHtml);

removeElementsByTagName('script', $doc);
removeElementsByTagName('style', $doc);
removeElementsByTagName('link', $doc);

// output cleaned html
echo $doc->saveHtml();

function removeElementsByTagName($tagName, $document) {
  $nodeList = $document->getElementsByTagName($tagName);
  for ($nodeIdx = $nodeList->length; --$nodeIdx >= 0; ) {
    $node = $nodeList->item($nodeIdx);
    $node->parentNode->removeChild($node);
  }
}

You can try it here: https://eval.in/private/4f225fa0dcb4eb

Documentation

  • DomDocument - http://php.net/manual/en/class.domdocument.php
  • DomNodeList - http://php.net/manual/en/class.domnodelist.php
  • DomDocument::getElementsByTagName - http://us3.php.net/manual/en/domdocument.getelementsbytagname.php

Even regex is not a good tool for this kind of task, for small simple task it may work.


If you want to remove just inner text of tag(s), use:

preg_replace('/(<(script|style)\b[^>]*>).*?(<\/\2>)/is', "$1$3", $txt);

See demo here.

If you want to remove also tags, replacement string in the above code would be empty, so just "".