preg_match_all() help

[shawon22]

could somebody tell me what i'm doing wrong here? i would like get a list of all the links from a site.

<?
$url = "http://www.php.net";
$data =  getData($url);

$search = "|<a href=\".*\*>.*</a>|i";

preg_match_all ($search, $data, $match);

while (list($key, $val) = each($match))
{
  echo "<p>$key => $val</p>";
}

function getData($url)
{
	$ch = curl_init();
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$url);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
	$result =curl_exec ($ch);
	curl_close ($ch);
 return $result;
}

?>

[ednark]

doh!

1)

you have to wrap what you want to save in parens ()

$search = "|<a href=\".**>.*</a>|i";

$search = "|(<a href=\".**>.*</a>)|i";

2)

i don't know what .** means, it throws an error for me

your regex is a little ambiguous with will your ., it will grab bnunches of links at the same time in some cases. use an ungreedy
match by following the . with a ?

ungreedy:
$search = "|(<a href=\".?\">.?</a>)|i";

<?php

$url = "http://www.php.net";

$data =  getData($url);

///$search = "|<a href=\".**>.*</a>|i";
$search = "|(<a href=\".*?\">.*?</a>)|i";

preg_match_all ($search, $data, $match);

while (list($key, $val) = each($match[1]))
{
  echo "<p>$key => $val</p>";
}

function getData($url)
{
    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$url);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
    $result = curl_exec ($ch);
    curl_close ($ch);
    return $result;
}

?>

[shawon22]

hi ednark thanks a lot for u help it worked but however i've a questions and problem i hope u/someoneelse could help me out.

question:
y r u using $match[1] but not $match
problem:
when i try to use this url("http://biz.yahoo.com/n/a/aol.html") instead of php.net i get only one link

i would really appreciate if u could answer those 2 questions.

thanx again.

[ednark]

ok when you match shomething...

eveyting that gets matched goes into $match[0]

so

preg_match( '/(b) (c) d e (f)/', 'a b c d e f g', $match)

should produce

$match[0] = 'b c d e f g'
$match[1] = 'b'
$match[2] = 'c'
$match[3] = 'f'

notice $matches[1] corrosponds to the first set of (), etc.

preg_match_all assumes each one of the elemtns in $match is an array

preg_match_all( '/(b) (.)/', 'a b c d e f g', $match)

$match[0] = 'b c d e f g'
$match[1] = array( 'b' )
$match[2] = array( 'c', ' ', 'd', ' ', 'e', ' ', 'f', ' ', 'g' )

does that make more sense, or does that confuse you more