Question about string manipulation - extracting URLs from <a href=""></a> code

dodginess

Hi All,

I would be grateful if someone could help me with the following question please:

If I have a standard line of HTML stored in a variable in my script such as

<a href="http://www.mydomain.com/" class="mainlevel" >My Site</a>

what code could I use to extract both the URL and the page name between the <a></a> tags and store them in separate variables? The URLs are all different lengths so I need to use some form of pattern matching but - being a newbie - can't work out which functions or pattern matching commands to use. I know that it should be possible to do boundary searches but I haven't found any script examples that show how this is done.

Thanks in advance 😃

Neil

dagon

please search before posting, this has been asked here dozens of times and on the net thousands.

dodginess

Hello,

Thank you for your constructive advice - I had already searched on Google and the forums and didn't find what I needed, hence the post.

Regards,

Neil

foyer

what you are looking for is 'regular expressions'

try that in your keyword search

dagon

dodginess wrote:
I had already searched on Google and the forums and didn't find what I needed, hence the post.

here's some more constructive advice for you-

http://www.google.co.nz/search?q=extract+url+from+link+php

162,000 results 90% of the sites listed on the first page of hits directly answer the questions