How do I do this?

[Hard_Styler]

Hey all,

Im making some email software and I need to be able to track the links that are sent in the email.

Does anyone have a script handy that can extract URL's and their descriptions from the Content string.

eg. emails body contains

Hey John Smith,
Check out our latest products.
- <a href='http://www.google.com'> Google </a>
- <a href='http://www.smileys.com'>Smileys</a>

Would retrieve 'http://www.google.com' and its description 'Google'

Thanks for your help guys!

[elementaluk]

get Regex-Coach (search google for it) or be lazy and go to: http://www.regexlib.com/ they most likely have one for something as simple as that.

then just use preg_match() or preg_match_all()
[no i'm not going to write it for you]

[Hard_Styler]

ok did what you said, things were looking all good but then i got this error:

Unknown modifier '"' in *** on line 14

any ideas?

thanks for your help so far 😃

edit: using the regular expression

^{<a\s+href\s=\s"http:\/\/(["])"([>])>(.*?(?=<\/a>))<\/a>$}

[Hard_Styler]

w00t. ended up getting the code, for anyone else with the same problem the code is below

$html = $str;

$urls = '(http|file|ftp)'; 
$ltrs = '\w'; 
$gunk = '/#~:.?+=&%@!\-'; 
$punc = '.:?\-'; 
$any = "$ltrs$gunk$punc"; 
preg_match_all("{ 
                  \b 
                  $urls   : 
                  [$any] +? 


                  (?= 
                    [$punc] * 
                    [^$any] 
                  | 
                    $ 
                  ) 
              }x", $html, $matches); 

return $matches;	

it doesn't get the description of the link but beggers cant be choosers 😃 😉 :p

[dnast]

I couldn't help but try my own. It probably could be a little more elegant but it works with every situation I could think of. It also returns the description.

preg_match_all('/<a(?:\s+|\s+[^>]+)href=([^>\s]+)(?:\s(?:[^>]+)?)?>([^<]+?)<\/a>/i',$a_tag,$matches);

$matches[1] contains the URLs and $matches[2] contains the descriptions

Edit: Had to make a slight change. Was accepting <ahref...> (without the space)