Find image link from string which is wrapped by a tag

Question

I need to extract just image link to use as background image of a div using

<a href="http://heartymagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/watch-derek-jeter-jordan-brand-video.png"><img src="http://heartymagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/watch-derek-jeter-jordan-brand-video.png" alt="" title="watch-derek-jeter-jordan-brand-video" width="270" height="170" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-73989" /></a>

PHP. I can't handle regular expressions to extract the image url. Please help me.

<a href="http://heartymagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/watch-derek-jeter-jordan-brand-video.png"><img src="http://heartymagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/watch-derek-jeter-jordan-brand-video.png" alt="" title="watch-derek-jeter-jordan-brand-video" width="270" height="170" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-73989" /></a>

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered May 02 '15 at 13:51

Try this:

$input $ = '<a href="http://heartymagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/watch-derek-jeter-jordan-brand-video.png"><img src="http://heartymagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/watch-derek-jeter-jordan-brand-video.png" alt="" title="watch-derek-jeter-jordan-brand-video" width="270" height="170" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-73989" /></a>';
$regexp = "<img[^']*?src=\"([^']*?)\"[^']*?>"; 
if(preg_match_all("/$regexp/siU", $input, $matches)) {
   var_dump($matches[1]);
}

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered May 02 '15 at 13:53

A very crude solution... of sorts.

    $s='<a href="http://heartymagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/watch-derek-jeter-jordan-brand-video.png"><img src="http://heartymagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/watch-derek-jeter-jordan-brand-video.png" alt="" title="watch-derek-jeter-jordan-brand-video" width="270" height="170" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-73989" /></a>';

    preg_match('@"(http://.*)"@',$s,$m);
    echo '<pre>';
    echo str_replace(array('"','>'),'',$m[1]);
    echo '</pre>';

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 10:24

A good practice is to use a DOM parser instead of regular expressions when extracting information from HTML.

One possible solution:

Read the HTML into a SimpleXMLElement object
Run an xpath query to find all img tags
Get the src attribute value of the first img tag found

Code:

$html = '<a href="http://heartymagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/watch-derek-jeter-jordan-brand-video.png"><img src="http://heartymagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/watch-derek-jeter-jordan-brand-video.png" alt="" title="watch-derek-jeter-jordan-brand-video" width="270" height="170" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-73989" /></a>';

// Long version
$dom        = new SimpleXMLElement($html);
$images     = $dom->xpath('//img');
$firstImage = $images[0];
$src        = $firstImage['src'];

// Short version
$src = (new SimpleXMLElement($html))->xpath('//img')[0]['src'];

$src will then contain (for both versions):

http://heartymagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/watch-derek-jeter-jordan-brand-video.png

Find image link from string which is wrapped by a tag

3 Answers3