How would one strip text before and after a certain html tag

Basically I want to take something like:

textheretextheretexthere
<table>
<tr><td>heres some stuff</td><td>and some morestuff</td></tr>
</table>
moretextheremoretexthere

and remove all the texthere and moretext here just leaving the table

Solution

You need to find <table> position with strpos and then use substr to remove the text to this point.and then the same for </table>

$string = 'textheretextheretexthere<table><tr><td>heres some stuff</td><td>and some morestuff</td></tr></table>moretextheremoretexthere';

$table_pos = strpos($string,'<table>');
$string = substr($string,$table_pos);
//Your string now is <table><tr><td>heres some stuff</td><td>and some morestuff</td></tr></table>moretextheremoretexthere

$endtable_pos = strpos($string,'</table>')+8;//added 8 so i wont exclude </table>
$clean_string = substr($string,0,$endtable_pos);
//Your string now is <table><tr><td>heres some stuff</td><td>and some morestuff</td></tr></table>

Of course this is not perfect at all,i know but you got the hint,you can work on improving it and maybe end up with a function that helps you solve your problem.