Regular expression

[pedroz]

$link_text = 'Apply now';

$content = '<td align="right" class="apply">   <a href="http://domain.com?h=AJ&cm=Details_ApplyNow" onClick="ApplyNowClick(\'A7C6NP\');" title="Apply for this now!">Apply Now</a></td>';


$pattern = '|<a[^>]+>('.$link_text.')</[^>]+>|U';   

preg_match($pattern, $content, $output); 


$pattern = '/<[a]{1}(.*)?>(.*)<\/[a]{1}>/';  

$content = trim(preg_replace($pattern, '$1', $output[0])); 

... // then parse $content to get the href url

Is it possible to know what is wrong with the regular expression to get the href of this tag?
<td align="right" class="apply"> <a href="http://domain.com?h=AJ&cm=Details_ApplyNow" onClick="ApplyNowClick(\'A7C6NP\');" title="Apply for this now!">Apply Now</a></td>

Not getting anything in $output. I've this code working for a similar <a ..> tag.

Thanks!

[bradgrafelman]

What's wrong is that you're using 2 overly-complicated regexp's where 1 moderately simple one would do. For example, I'd probably start with a pattern like:

@<a .*href=["'](.+)["'].*>@siU

(untested) and work from there.

However, note that if you're parsing a full HTML document, you'd be a lot better off just using [man]DOM[/man] to parse the HTML.