PHP extract link from tag

Question

Possible Duplicate:
PHP String Manipulation: Extract hrefs

I am using php and have string with content =

<a href="www.something.com">Click here</a>

I need to get rid of everything except "www.something.com" I assume this can be done with regular expressions. Any help is appreciated! Thank you

seems like everyone want to do this. – dqhendricks Jun 15 '11 at 23:59 — dqhendricks, Jun 15 '11 at 23:59

score 57 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 15 '11 at 23:55

57

This is very easy to do using SimpleXML:

$a = new SimpleXMLElement('<a href="www.something.com">Click here</a>');
echo $a['href']; // will echo www.something.com

answered Jun 15 '11 at 23:55

mfonda

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One line solution `$url = (string)( new SimpleXMLElement('Click here'))['href'];` – SkyRar May 29 '19 at 08:03

score 28 · Answer 2 · edited Jun 22 '17 at 19:17

28

Give this a whirl:

$link = '<a href="www.something.com">Click here</a>';
preg_match_all('/<a[^>]+href=([\'"])(?<href>.+?)\1[^>]*>/i', $link, $result);

if (!empty($result)) {
    # Found a link.
    echo $result['href'][0];
}

Result: www.something.com

Updated: Now requires the quoting style to match, addressing the comment below.

edited Jun 22 '17 at 19:17

leek

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answered Jun 15 '11 at 23:52

Tails

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this can matches this: `href="_url_'` And that's wrong – dynamic Jun 15 '11 at 23:54
not 100%. if you allow `'` then you should allow even no quote at all: `href=url`. Now stuff **gets harder**. – dynamic Jun 15 '11 at 23:59
It does, with increased accuracy comes increased complexity. I'll leave it up to the OP to decide if what I've proposed is 'good enough' for his application. If you're going to go down the rabbit hole, read this first: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454 – Tails Jun 16 '11 at 00:03
that link was where I wanted to bring you ^_^ – dynamic Jun 16 '11 at 00:04

score 3 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 15 '11 at 23:59

3

I would suggest following code for this:

$str = '<a href="www.something.com">Click here</a>';
preg_match('/href=(["\'])([^\1]*)\1/i', $str, $m);
echo $m[2] . "\n";

OUTPUT

www.something.com

This will take care of both single quote ' and double quote " in the href link.

answered Jun 15 '11 at 23:59

anubhava

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not at all because you wrote just `([^"]*)` – dynamic Jun 16 '11 at 00:00
@yes123: Pls check now, I meant to use back reference `\1` there but in hurry typed `"`. – anubhava Jun 16 '11 at 00:04
way better now. Also considering you needed the first parenthesis you could simplify it to `("|\')` – dynamic Jun 16 '11 at 00:06

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Jun 15 '11 at 23:53

1

Assuming that is ALWAYS the format of the variable, below should do the trick. If the content may not be a link, this won't work. Essentially it looks for data enclosed within two quotations.

<?php

$string = '<a href="www.something.com">Click here</a>';

$pattern = '/"[a-zA-Z0-9.\/\-\?\&]*"/';

preg_match($pattern, $string, $matches);
print_r($matches);
?>

answered Jun 15 '11 at 23:53

John Poulin

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5

Yeah. As you can see, I'm a little rusty with my Regular Expressions ;) – John Poulin Jun 16 '11 at 00:10

hakre · Answer 5 · 2013-10-15T20:21:26.380

-1

As probably you didn't meant your question that easy, but this does exactly what you're asking for:

$link = '<a href="www.something.com">Click here</a>';
$href = substr($link, 9, -16);

$href is:

string(17) "www.something.com"

As a regular expression it can be expressed it as this is:

$href = preg_match('(^<a href="([^"]*)">Click here</a>$)', $link, $matches) ? $matches[1] : die('Invalid input data.');

Is this helpful?

edited Oct 15 '13 at 20:21

answered Jun 15 '11 at 23:46

hakre

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lol are you asking for a lots of -1? Note i didn't -1 you. You can check from my profile/reputation – dynamic Jun 15 '11 at 23:47

PHP extract link from tag

5 Answers5

OUTPUT

Linked

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