Regular Expression syntax problem...

[Thanasus]

Hello,

I am trying to parse out URLs in links from an HTML page that I read. I read the entire HTML page into a string called $html. Now, this HTML page has numerous links on it. The links which interest me, however, have an id attribute which a particular prefix.

Example:

<a id=main34 href=index.html>
<a id=main35 href=about.html>

I only want the href values, which may or may not be surrounded by single or double quotes, of anchor tags which have an id value beginning with "main".

I am trying something like
<a\sid=main\Shref\s=\s.*>

I'm not having much luck though, any help would be appreciated.

[Merve]

Read the file into a string. Use preg_replace() to replace all the < a href="foo"> with <a href = ~foo~> or just use a pattern like that that does not occur anywhere else in the text of the page. And for your singles quotes, run another preg_replace but this time for single quotes. Then use this:

preg_match_all("/~~~.~~~/", "$string_that_contains_contents_of_file", "$array_that_will_contain_matches");

Then use the substr() function to remove the tildes.