Solve regular expression

[phpsharma]

Please give a regular expression (preferably Perl/PREG style) which can be used to identify the URL from within a HTML link tag. Example: The regular expression should match the tag <A HREF="http://www.xyzzyx.com/"> and give the URL ("http://www.xyzzyx.com/") as a return result. Tags should also be matched if they contain other attributes than the HREF attribute.

bye
sharma

[mcrbids]

Here's something that should work reasonably well with a tad of tweakin'...

$match=
"/<.?[hH][rR][eE][fF]\s?=\s?{0,1}\"{0,1}(.?)[\"\s>]+/";

This is a 60-second, shooting from the hip form. There's another, more comprehensive at http://us4.php.net/manual/en/function.preg-replace.php

You might also consider using strip_tags(), which returns the text of tags stripped. Just "allow" just about every tag type you can think of except the "a" tag, and trap the return.

-Ben