I'm making an automated script with PHP to check if my link exists at my partner website ( link exchange) .. besides making sure my link exists in the source code , I want to make sure he is not placing it in a HTML comment like <!-- http://www.mywebsite.com --> and cheating me ..
I tried to match it with REGEXP , but have failed
Use the DOM and XPath, it ignores comments:
$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTML($htmlstring);
$xpath = new DOMXPath($doc);
$result = $xpath->query('//a[contains(@href, "mywebsite.com")]');
if (!$result->length) echo "You've been cheated\n";
And then if you still want to know if your website is being commented out
if (strpos($htmlstring, 'mywebsite.com') !== false && !$result->length)
echo "Your partner is hiding your link in a comment, sneaky bastard\n";
Sounds like a perfect use for an HTML parser like DOMDocument->loadHTML() and look for an anchor tag with your link. He could still remove it via javascript on the browser side, but that's a different issue.
If it's a cat and mouse game of "are you showing a link to my site" using a standard parser is your best bet. There are just too many ways for a regex to fail on html.
