php - Preg_replace match on word boundery and not in link

Question

I'm trying to write a regex to match words on boundery and because text is in html I need to avoid words that are in <a>here more words</a>.

My regex for now is: /word/u

Example text:

<p>Example lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Curabitur <a href="">porta lorem nec</a> tortor laoreet gravida.</p>

Searching for word lorem should be replaced only at the beginning, not in <a>.

Answer 1

You could use some dark powers like the following:

<a[^>]*>.*?</as*>(*SKIP)(*FAIL)|lorem

Let's break it down:

<a[^>]*>            # match an opening "a" tag
.*?                 # match anything ungreedy until ...
</as*>             # match a closing "a" tag
(*SKIP)(*FAIL)      # skip it
|                   # or
lorem           # match lorem with boundaries

So basically we first skip all a tags, then we match lorem.

See a working demo