How to get image url using preg_match

Question

Im tring to use preg_match to grab image URLs from another page but problem is my PHP code always returns an empty result! I'm new to php.

Here is the stucture of the image on that page...

<a class="prs_link" href="xxxx"><img src="THE IMAGE URL I WANT TO GET" width="310" height="196"></a>

My current code is:

preg_match_all('/a class="prs_link" href="([^"]+)"><img src=.+?><\/a>/',$screen,$results);

[The pony he comes...](http://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/554546) — , May 05 '12 at 14:24
but my whole code is consist of regex so i need to do this in this way! no one knows an answer?? — Dilon Perera, May 05 '12 at 14:34
Regular expressions are the wrong tool for this. Use a parser. — , May 05 '12 at 19:35

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered May 05 '12 at 14:48

You will see literally hundreds of Q&A here on SO cautioning coders using regex to parse HTML. There is a good reason of those comments/answers so please adhere to that and avoid finding regex solution to parse out HTML.

Here is one recommended way of parsing HTML (using DOM):

$html = '<a class="prs_link" href="xxxx"><img src="THE IMAGE URL I WANT TO GET" width="310" height="196"></a>';
$doc = new DOMDocument();
libxml_use_internal_errors(true);
$doc->loadHTML($html); // loads your html
$xpath = new DOMXPath($doc);
$src = $xpath->evaluate("string(//a[@class='prs_link']/img/@src)");
echo "src=[$src]\n";

Output:

src=[THE IMAGE URL I WANT TO GET]

How to get image url using preg_match

1 Answers1

Output: