Regular expression to display >quotes in style

There’s some text in my db with quotes in it. In their raw form they look like this:

&gt;Some quote <br />
Some simple text<br />
<br>
&gt; another quote with random <b>tags</b> and <a href=>links</a> in it

What I wanted to do is make those quotes look somewhat distinctive from other text – either in php part before they go to the database or when they’re displayed on the page (doesn’t matter much to me, whichever would work).

Problem is there’s little consistency: there might be extra spaces, other closing tags, etc. Might be a few per string, in a row or not. The only thing that’s the same is > (not > – it’s how it saved in db) in the beginning and end of line OR end of string at the end of a quote.

Closest thing I could manage myself is below, and it covers for some quotes – but not those that are at the very end, and sometimes it gets interrupted with random tags.

preg_replace("/&gt;([^*]*)<br/", "<mark class='quote'>$1</mark><br", $string);

Any way to fix it? Thanks in advance!

Answer

You need to make the quantifier not greedy with a ?, and look for <br or the end of the string by using an alteration.

&gt;([^*]*?)(<br|$)

replacement should be <mark class='quote'>$1</mark>$2 so you put the <br or end line back.

https://regex101.com/r/j8Itii/1/