Help - need to extract links from an HTML string

believer

Hi,
I need to extract all links and their descriptions from a string containing HTML entities (e.g. $str = '<a href=www>www</a> ...'). Most of the code I found on the internet uses preg_match_all to extract links but some regular expressions do not work returning no output at all, and other extract just the HREF= element which is not satisfactory in my case since I need both HREF= and the text enclosed between A tags. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

trooper

Its your lucky day

here is some code that does what you want

function link_extractor($s)
{
   $a = array();

   if(preg_match_all('/<a\s+.*?href=[\"\']?([^\"\' >]*)[\"\']?[^>]*>(.*?)<\/a>/i',$s,$matches,PREG_SET_ORDER))
   {
		foreach($matches as $match)
		{
			array_push($a,array($match[1],$match[2]));
		}
	}
	return $a;
}



$page =<<<EOD
	hi <a href="http://www.google.com">there how are you</a>
EOD;

$links = link_extractor($page);

print_r($links);

HTH

trooper

Believer can you respond to this post - so i will know that it works for you

cheers

believer

Hi,

Thank your for your reply ( the only one so far 🙂 ). I tried your code, but PHP began complaining about unexpected ] and [ symbols, which most probably was caused by the quote characters. I tried to escape them, but after escaping I got an empty array with a warining message:

Warning: Unknown modifier 'a'

However I found a solution to this problem. The following regexp does the job:

preg_match_all("|<a( +[a-zA-Z]+=\"?([^{>^{\"]+)\"?)+>(.*)</a>|U",$Source,$Output)}}

It returns all links found in $Output. The only restriction is that tags must be in lower cases which could be easily achieved with str_replace before the regexp. I hope this would be useful to other members of this forum.

Cheers

trooper

The problem is that the board stripped out some of the back slashes so i've attached it as a file

Note that the line EOD; need to have all the spaces removed before it (sorry about that oversight).

HTH