title: Replacing all of the characters in between two html tags with whitespace in PHP
body: <p>I'm trying to write some code to replace every character between two html tags (<code>&lt;del&gt;</code> tag to be specific) with a whitespace, but I'm struggling with the PHP string methods.<br>
  An example of how the code should operate: if the initial string is <code>"blahblah&lt;del&gt;blahblah&lt;/del&gt;blahblah"</code>, ideally the result would be <code>"blahblah        blahblah"</code> with 8 whitespaces (for the 8 character length of the piece between the <code>&lt;del&gt;</code> tags) in between the two <code>blahblah</code>'s  </p>
  
  <p>I'm writing this code for a pretty basic server, so I don't have access to any extra libraries/services like Node,etc.</p>
  
  <p>Any help would be appreciated!</p>
  
  <p>Edit: The text between the <code>&lt;del&gt;</code> tags is variable in length. It's not always 8 characters long.</p>