Remove <ul> tags from beginning and end of string (JavaScript or PHP)

Question

I receive data in the following format from the server

<ul>
    <li>Some text</li>
    <li>Other text</li>
</ul>

Basically string containing a standard unordered list. What I want to do now is to remove the ul tags that wrap the list items, so that I would only receive the inner content. Like this:

<li>Some text</li>
<li>Other text</li>

It might be worth mentioning that ul tags will always be present when I get the data so I don't realy care whats inside it, or are there any more ul tags nested within. I just need to remove the outer ones and get the data inside.

Either a JavaScript or PHP solution would be welcomed.

Answer 1

var div = document.createElement("div");
div.innerHTML = "<ul><li></li></ul>";
div.firstChild.innerHTML; //"<li></li>"

Note that .firstChild will only be ul if there is no whitespace/text at the beginning of the string.

In that case you could use:

var div = document.createElement("div");
div.innerHTML = "    <ul><li></li></ul>";
div.getElementsByTagName("ul")[0].innerHTML //"<li></li>"

instead

Answer 2

var txt="<ul>\n    <li>Some text</li>\n    <li>Other text</li>\n</ul>";
var result=txt.replace(/^<ul>\s*/,'').replace(/\s*<\/ul>$/,'');

Answer 3

text.replace(/^<ul>/, "")​​​​​​​​​​​​.replace(/<\/ul>$/, "");