php regex to remove attributes of html tags except hyper links <a> tags

Question

Please suggest me PHP regex for preg_replace to remove just all the attributes from HTML tags except <a> tag.

I tried already: preg_replace("/<([az][a-z0-9]*)[^>]*?(\\/?)>/i",'<$1$2>',$htmltext);

It works fine for all the HTML tags but for <a> tag it removes href, title and target attributes.

Please suggest me the required changes in above regex or please share the working one.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

to remove all the tags from HTML tags except <a> tag.

No need of regex, you can just use strip_tags function :

$html = strip_tags($html, '<a>');

UPDATE: preg_replace to remove just all the attributes from HTML tags except from <a> . You can use this negative lookahead based regex:

$htmltext = preg_replace("~<(?!a\s)([a-z][a-z0-9]*)[^>]*?(/?)>~i",'<$1$2>', $htmltext);