What are some alternative approaches or techniques for identifying and extracting placeholder elements in HTML templates with optional elements using PHP?

When dealing with HTML templates that contain optional elements, it can be challenging to identify and extract placeholder elements using PHP. One approach is to use regular expressions to search for specific patterns in the HTML code that indicate the presence of placeholders. Another technique is to parse the HTML using a library like DOMDocument and iterate through the elements to identify placeholders based on certain criteria.

// Sample HTML template with optional elements
$html = '<div>{{title}}</div><div>{{content}}</div><div>{{optional}}</div>';

// Using regular expressions to identify placeholder elements
preg_match_all('/{{(.*?)}}/', $html, $matches);
$placeholders = $matches[1];

// Output the identified placeholder elements
print_r($placeholders);