In what scenarios would it be more appropriate to use regular expressions instead of built-in PHP functions like strip_tags for parsing HTML content?

Regular expressions are more appropriate for parsing HTML content when you need to perform complex pattern matching or manipulation that cannot be easily achieved with built-in PHP functions like strip_tags. For example, if you need to extract specific data from HTML tags or manipulate the structure of the HTML content, regular expressions provide more flexibility and control. However, it's important to note that regular expressions can be more complex and error-prone compared to using built-in functions, so they should be used judiciously. 

$html_content = '<div><p>Hello, <strong>world</strong>!</p></div>';

// Using regular expressions to extract text content within <p> tags
preg_match('/<p>(.*?)<\/p>/', $html_content, $matches);
$text_content = $matches[1];

echo $text_content; // Output: Hello, <strong>world</strong>!

Keywords

regular expressions strip_tags parsing HTML content scenarios

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