php - How to remove empty paragraph tags from string?

Question

I ran into a slight coding problem with WordPress template. This is the code I use in template:

<?php echo teaser(40); ?>

In my functions, I use this to strip tags and get content from allowed tags only.

<?php
function teaser($limit) {
    $content = explode(' ', get_the_content(), $limit);
    if (count($content)>=$limit) {
    array_pop($content);
    $content = implode(" ",$content).'...';
    } else {
    $content = implode(" ",$content);
    }   
    $content = preg_replace('/[.+]/','', $content);
    $content = apply_filters('the_content', $content); 
    $content = str_replace(']]>', ']]&gt;', $content);
    $content = strip_tags($content, '<p><a><ul><li><i><em><strong>');
    return $content;
}
?>

The problem: I use the above code to strip tags from the content, but WordPress already puts image tags within paragraph. So the result is empty paragraph tags where images are stripped.

Just for the sake of cleaning up my code and useless empty tags. My question is how to remove empty paragraph tags?

<p></p>

Thanks a lot in advance! :)

Answer 1

use this regex to remove empty paragraph

/<p[^>]*><\/p[^>]*>/

example

<?php
$html = "abc<p></p><p>dd</p><b>non-empty</b>"; 
$pattern = "/<p[^>]*><\/p[^>]*>/"; 
//$pattern = "/<[^/>]*>([s]?)*</[^>]*>/";  use this pattern to remove any empty tag

echo preg_replace($pattern, '', $html); 
// output
//abc<p>dd</p><b>non-empty</b>
?>