Get string inside div in PHP

As this is a piece of HTML code, you can use the class DOMDocument :

$qtd = '<div id="itens">                
            <span>
                435 itens encontrados
            </span>
        </div>';

$doc = new \DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTML($qtd);

$elements = $doc->getElementsByTagName("div");

echo $elements[0]->nodeValue;

In this way, the result of echo would be the contents of div , including the span tag, as described in the question. But if the content you want is span , just change the tag name to:

$doc->getElementsByTagName("div");
// -------------------------^

As follows:

$qtd = '<div id="itens"><span>435 itens encontrados</span></div>';

$doc = new \DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTML($qtd);

$elements = $doc->getElementsByTagName("span");

echo $elements[0]->nodeValue;

The result will be:

435 itens encontrados

Use the strip_tags () function together with trim (), it removes the String tags Ex:

$out = trim(strip_tags($qtd));

var_dump($out);

Output will result in:

string(21) "435 itens encontrados"

If you want to keep the span tag, you can do this:

$out2 = trim(strip_tags($qtd, "<span>"));

Output:

string(66) "<span>
            435 itens encontrados
           </span>"

Reference: strip_tags php manual .