PHP begin <p> element from text only

Question

Am currently working of facebook instant article for my website but the in-post images are not showing because the <figure> element representing the image must be included standalone within the body of the article and not enclosed within a <p> element.

$message="[img]http://img.loadedcamp.net/hfjfjd.jpg[/img]

This is the news and it is here.

[img]http://img.loadedcamp.net/YTgxbj.jpg[/img]

The new is posted by an author";

This is nl2p() function

function nl2p($string, $only_if_no_html = FALSE) {
$replace = TRUE;
if ($only_if_no_html) {
$str2 = strip_tags($string);
if ($str2 != $string) {
  $replace = FALSE;
}
}
if ($replace) {
 return
  '<p>'
  .preg_replace('#(<br\s*?/?>\s*?){2,}#', '</p>'."\n".'<p>', nl2br($string))
  .'</p>';
   }
}

This image bbcode changer;

function savedimg($string) {
$string = preg_replace("#\[img\](.*?)\[/img\]#is", '<figure> <img src="$1"/> </figure>', $string);
return $string;
}

echo nl2p(savedimg($message)); outputted this;

<p><figure> <img src="http://img.loadedcamp.net/hfjfjd.jpg" /> </figure></p>
<p>This is the news and it is here.</p>
<p><figure> <img src="http://img.loadedcamp.net/YTgxbj.jpg" /> </figure></p>
<p>The new is posted by an author</p>

I want the p element not to be in-between the images. Please help guys!

This is what i expected as output;

<figure> <img src="http://img.loadedcamp.net/hfjfjd.jpg" /> </figure>
<p>This is the news and it is here.</p>
<figure> <img src="http://img.loadedcamp.net/YTgxbj.jpg" /> </figure>
<p>The new is posted by an author</p>

Answer 1

Change the regex pattern in your savedimg function to the following:

...
$string = preg_replace("#(<p>\s*?)?\[img\](.*?)\[/img\](\s*?</p>)?#is", '<figure> <img src="$2"/> </figure>', $string );
...