Parsing A URL out of a String...

GroZZleR

Hey all,

I'm trying to parse some URLs out of strings, but I'm having 0 luck with it. I'm terrible with RegEx, so hopefully someone can come in here and give me a hand.

I'm parsing code that could look like this:

<a href="/news/archive.asp">Archive</a> / <a href="/news/search.asp">Search</a><br>

or like this:

<a href="/community/links.shtm">Links</a><br>

Now what I want are the contents of the quotations, following a href=

So basically, I want a variable (lets call it $ParsedURL) to contain /comunity/links.shtm

And nothing else, not the <a href>, not the stuff following it, nothing.

Just EXACTLY whats in the quotations, it doesn't matter if its a mailto: or a [url]http://[/url] or an [url]ftp://,[/url] I just want the exact contents.

I can't figure it out for the life of me, maybe someone else can?

EDIT: Oh, and this code is in an array whcih could contain lines that don't have a link on 'em at all, could just be straight text, so we can't just assume its always a link.

Merve

Read that into a string and use preg_match_all() to extract the URLs.

pyro

<?PHP
$str = '<a href="http://www.w3c.org/">W3C</a><br /><a href=\\'http://www.php.net/\\'>PHP</a>';
preg_match_all("/<a href=['\"]?(.*?)['\"]?>/", $str, $matches);
$urls = $matches[1]; # $urls is an array of the found URLs
?>

GroZZleR

Originally posted by pyro

<?PHP
$str = '<a href="http://www.w3c.org/">W3C</a><br /><a href=\\'http://www.php.net/\\'>PHP</a>';
preg_match_all("/<a href=['\"]?(.*?)['\"]?>/", $str, $matches);
$urls = $matches[1]; # $urls is an array of the found URLs
?>

[/B]

Hey Pyro, are you in the market for some babies? Because I want to have your babies.. lol.

Thanks a bunch man, hours of headaches solved in 2 minutes by you =P

pyro

lol 😃

I think I'd better work on finding a steady job first. 😉

superwormy

Heres another solution, gives a little more than what you wanted though...
http://www.uglyslug.com/uglyslug_PHP/#HTML_AnchorSpider

GroZZleR

Hey Pyro,

I jumped the gun on the baby having...

$str = '<a href="http://www.w3c.org/" class="stuff">W3C</a><br /><a href="http://www.php.net/">PHP</a>';
preg_match_all("/<a href=['\"]?(.*?)['\"]?>/i", $str, $matches);
$urls = $matches[1]; # $urls is an array of the found URLs

print_r($urls);

I've added a class="stuff"

The output is now:
Array ( [0] => http://www.w3c.org/" class="stuff [1] => http://www.php.net/ )

As you can see, it has a trailing " and then class="stuff

Thats not quite what I'm looking for =)

How can I refine it? Once again, I'm terrible with this RegEx shit =P

rheroux

Try changing it to this:


$str = '<a href="http://www.w3c.org/" target="top" class="stuff">W3C</a><br /><a href="http://www.php.net/">PHP</a>';
preg_match_all("/<a href=['\"](.*?)['\"].*>/i", $str, $matches);
$urls = $matches[1]; # $urls is an array of the found URLs 

print_r($urls);

pyro

If you always enclose your URLs in either single or double quotes (as you should) this is the easy answer:

<?PHP
$str = '<a href="http://www.w3c.org/" class="stuff">W3C</a><br /><a href="http://www.php.net/">PHP</a>';
preg_match_all("/<a(?:.*?)href=['\"](.*?)['\"](?:.*?)>/i", $str, $matches);
$urls = $matches[1]; # $urls is an array of the found URLs

print_r($urls);
?>