In PHP Remove Value of Attributes using Regex

Question

Say I have the following string:

<a name="anchor" title="anchor title">

Currently I can extract name and title with strpos and substr, but I want to do it right. How can I do this with regex? And what if I wanted to extract from many of these tags within a block of text?

I've tried this regex:

/name="([A-Z,a-z])\w+/g

But it gets the name=" part as well, I just want the value.

Can do with RegEx, but would advise DOM reading if possible, faster. What is your code example of what you have tried? — Twisty, Jun 19 '15 at 16:30
You shouldn't be working with regex for this specific use case. I suggest referring to these docs: http://php.net/manual/en/class.domdocument.php — lucasnadalutti, Jun 19 '15 at 16:31
If you want to do it right use an HTML parser. Regex is not a sensible approach to parsing HTML. — PiranhaGeorge, Jun 19 '15 at 16:32
Have a look here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3577641/how-do-you-parse-and-process-html-xml-in-php — Ole Spaarmann, Jun 19 '15 at 16:34
I'm actually parsing the data before the page is rendered so DOM is not possible, right? — NotaGuruAtAll, Jun 19 '15 at 16:35

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 19 '15 at 16:32

0

The regex (\S+)=["']?((?:.(?!["']?\s+(?:\S+)=|[>"']))+.)["']? can be used to extract all attributes

answered Jun 19 '15 at 16:32

Brian H

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score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 19 '15 at 16:41

DOMDocument example:

<?php
$titles = array();
$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTML("<html><body>Test<br><a name="anchor" title="anchor title"></body></html>");
$links = $doc->getElementsByTagName('a');
if ($links->length!=0) {
    foreach ($links as $a) {
        $titles[] = $a->getAttribute('title');
    }
}
?>

You commented: "I'm actually parsing the data before the page is rendered so DOM is not possible, right?"

We're working with the scraped HTML, so we construct a DOM with these functions and parse like XML.

Good examples in the comments here: http://php.net/manual/en/domdocument.getelementsbytagname.php

In PHP Remove Value of Attributes using Regex

2 Answers2