preg_match help

[Scott_J]

hi,

following on from something the other day I was having trouble with I need help with the this please 🙂

I currently have the following string. (split into two lines when output on this board)

$string2 = "This is <a href=\"http://www.hotmail.com\">Hotmail</a> the description
 part <a href=\"http://www.inlandrevenue.com\">Inland Revenue</a> here is another part of the description text again";

and I then have a regular expression that gets out all of the web links held in the URL. The code for this is as such

preg_match_all("|href=\"?([^\"' >]+)|i", $string2, $matches); 

echo "<p></p>";

echo count($matches[0]) . "<br>";

for ($i=0; $i< count($matches[0]); $i++) {
  echo "matched: ".$matches[1][$i]."<br>";
}

The output from this, looks like....

2
matched: [url]http://www.hotmail.com[/url]
matched: [url]http://www.inlandrevenue.com[/url]

The problem is that I also need the text from the link. So I need 'Hotmail' and 'Inland Revenue'. I can't get my head round regular expressions at all.

edited

I don't have to get them all out at the same time either. I'd probably prefer to get out the links with one match and the text with another regular expression.

🙂

Thanks

[Weedpacket]

There's a thread on extracting those bits from a link on this forum in the last couple of days. Admittedly it only works if the href attributes are quoted with double quotes. But three preg_match_all's (one with double quotes, one with single, and one without) with their results array_merged() would work.

The last preg_match_all() would need to look something more like

#<a.+href\s*=\s*([^ >]+)[^>]*>((?:(?!</a>).)*)</a>#si

The first two could be combined into one match, but this third one ends up looking sufficiently different that there's little point in trying to combine it with the other two (so why bother combining them at all?). But then, tag attribute values are supposed to be quoted anyway.