Question:

How can I remove the <strong>first</strong> instance of a certain piece of html from a string.

I'm looking to remove

</tr> </table></td> </tr

which is near the begining, but it also appears throughout the string.

I also need a way to do the same thing but the <strong>last</strong> instance of it.

Anyone know?

if you know roughly how close to the end of the string the substring that you want to replace is, you use substr_replace() with a negative $start and $length parameters, or you could just code up a function by hand to actually go through, find the last occurrence, then delete it. something like this (untested, written very quickly):

function replace_last_occurrence($haystack, $needle) { $pos = 0; $last = 0; while($pos !== false) { $pos = strpos($haystack, $needle, $pos); $last = $pos; } substr_replace($haystack, "", $last, strlen($needle)); }

similar, for first occurrence

function replace_first_occurrence($haystack, $needle) { substr_replace($haystack, "", strpos($haystack, $needle, $pos), strlen($needle)); }

you could also generalize this to replace the nth occurrence:

function replace_nth_occurrence($haystack, $needle, $n) { $pos = 0; $last = 0; for($i = 0 ; $i <= $n ; $i++) { $pos = strpos($haystack, $needle, $pos); $last = $pos; } substr_replace($haystack, "", $last, strlen($needle)); }

simplest way is to explode/split the string shift the top and pop the last then implode what's left with you're separator and concatenate the three.. i.e.:

$separator = 'your specified html separator here'; $bits = explode($separator , $yourhtml ); $start = array_shift($bits); $end = array_pop($bits); $sorted = $start . implode($separator,$bits) . $end;

(not tested)

This will delete last occurrence:

$needle = <<<EON </tr> </table></td> </tr EON; if(preg_match('`.*('.preg_quote($needle).')`s', $haystack, $m, PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE)) { $haystack = substr_replace($haystack, '', $m[1][1], strlen($m[1][0])); }

As additional bonus you may ignore varying number of whitespaces within searched fragment like this:

if(preg_match('`.*('.implode('\s+', array_map('preg_quote', preg_split('`\s+`', $needle))).')`s', $haystack, $m, PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE)) { $haystack = substr_replace($haystack, '', $m[1][1], strlen($m[1][0])); }

Or even search case-insensitively by adding i-flag to regexp:

if(preg_match('`.*('.implode('\s+', array_map('preg_quote', preg_split('`\s+`', $needle))).')`is', $haystack, $m, PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE)) { $haystack = substr_replace($haystack, '', $m[1][1], strlen($m[1][0])); }

You'll be wanting <a href="http://php.net/manual/en/function.str-replace.php" rel="nofollow">str_replace</a>. Replace that section with empty space (eg:"")