I recently ran across a situation where I need to strip a heavily nested html list such that only the top level was preserved. I started with a regular expression solution, but found that I kept matching the wrong closing ul with an outer opening ul.
This was my alternative solution, and it seems to work well:
<?php
function stripNestedLists($str)
{
$str2 = $str;
$lastStr = $str2;
do
{
$cul = strpos($str2, '</ul>');
$ul = 0;
$lastUL = 0;
do
{
$lastUL = $ul;
$ul = strpos($str2, '<ul', $ul+1);
}
while ($ul !== false && $ul < $cul);
$lastStr = $str2;
$str2 = substr_replace($str2, '', $lastUL, $cul-$lastUL+5);
$str2 = trim($str2);
}
while (strlen($str2) > 0);
return $lastStr;
}
?>
Hope this helps someone.
