parsing data

[jpr]

Hello, I have a string of data called $data. Inside of this string are html links in the format of <a ...... >. I need a way to pull out every link that is in the string and load it into an array. I made this code here but it doesnt seem to work. Any ideas?

$data = htmlentities($data);
parseLinks($data);

function parseLinks ($data) {
if(strstr($data,'&lt;a')) {
$start = strpos($data, '&lt;a');
$comment = strstr($data, '&lt;a');
$length = strpos($comment, '-&gt;') + 2;
$pageLink[] = $comment;
$data = substr_replace($data, '', $start, $length);
// recursive function so that it continues removing comments untill there are none left.
$data = parseLinks ($data);
return $pageLink;
} else {
return $pageLink;
}
}

[PHPGuru2]

I don't think "<" and "&lt;", ">" and "&gt;" are the same thing in the string. You may wanna use str_replace() function to replace "&lt;" and "&gt;" with "&lt;" and "&gt;" or simply compare "<" and ">" with your $data.

[rpanning]

I think regular expressions would work the best for you. If I'm reading your post right this should work.

preg_match_all("/\\<a.+href\\=[\"'](.*)[\"'].*\\>/i", $data, $matches);
for ($i=0; $i< count($matches[0]); $i++) {
    $pageLinks[] = $matches[0][$i];
}

I'm new to regular expressions my self so I'm not 100% sure thats right but give it a try. Check out regular expression syntax and preg_match_all for more info.

[jpr]

None of that has worked so far. I dont believe you can just search by the expressions '<' and '>' because php will give an error. It doesnt like those characters. I need a function that will parse out all the links in a string and load them into an array. That way I will be able to just loop through the array and print each link. Thanks!

[PHPGuru2]

You can always find some other ways to do this. For example, you can try to find the following instead of finding the "<a" and ">":

1) Actual link (http://www.phpbuilder.com/....)
2) href attribute along with " (quote) (e.g. href=" and the next ")

[jpr]

Can you please show me how to code a function that would do this?

[PHPGuru2]

This seems to work for me:

$text = ">a href="http://www.yahoo.com/"<Yahoo.com</a>";
$start = strpos($text,"href="") + 11;
$stripped = substr($text,$start);
$link = substr($stripped,0,strpos($stripped,"""));
echo $link;

$link would contain http://www.yahoo.com/