How to Extract IMG tag, value and text from a string with PHP

Question

I have a string extracted from the DB in this way:

<p><img style="margin: 5px; float: left;" alt="rotary-wheelchairs" src="images/stories/DSC_0693_400x400.jpg" />In a 2 week period, the Rotary Club of Playa, in partnership with the... 145 wheelchairs to disabled children and adults. </p>

I'd like to extract these three values from that string:

1- img: all the img tag or at least the value of the src

2- The alt value

3- The plain text, example "In a 2 week period, the..."

Any idea how can I achieve this?

use [`DOMDocument`](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3577641/how-do-you-parse-and-process-html-xml-in-php?rq=1) — Kevin, Dec 01 '15 at 00:42
the second answer below gives the idea, its wrong with some parts though — Kevin, Dec 01 '15 at 23:30

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 01 '15 at 00:50

If the strings are saved in that format, you can use regex and preg_match.

RegEx101.com Test Case

/(img).*?alt="(.*?)".*?src="(.*?)"/

<?php
    $reg = '/(img).*?alt="(.*?)".*?src="(.*?)"/';
    $str = '<p><img style="margin: 5px; float: left;" alt="rotary-wheelchairs" src="images/stories/DSC_0693_400x400.jpg" />In a 2 week period, the Rotary Club of Playa, in partnership with the... 145 wheelchairs to disabled children and adults. </p>';
    $matches = [];
    preg_match($reg, $str, $matches);
    $img = $matches[1];
    $alt = $matches[2];
    $src = $matches[3];
    print $img . ' ' . $alt . ' ' . $src;
?>

Does answering PHP questions feel dirty? – Mogsdad Dec 15 '15 at 19:31 — Mogsdad, Dec 15 '15 at 19:31
Almost as dirty as answering RegEx questions. – Dec 15 '15 at 19:31 — , Dec 15 '15 at 19:31

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 01 '15 at 00:52

2

You can try using some html parser for this. I have used domDocument :

$html = "Your html string"
$dom = new domDocument; 
$dom->loadHTML($html);
$img = $dom->getElementsByTagName('img')
//getting the src of image
echo $img->attributes->getNamedItem('src')->value . PHP_EOL;
//getting the alt value
echo $img->attributes->getNamedItem('alt')->value . PHP_EOL;
//plain text
echo $dom->textContent

answered Dec 01 '15 at 00:52

thepiyush13

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For some reason this brokes my code, I've just made a copy paste and the code stop loading at this section when this code is used – Saymon Dec 01 '15 at 19:15
The problem seems to be here: echo $img->attributes->getNamedItem('src')->value . PHP_EOL; //getting the alt value echo $img->attributes->getNamedItem('alt')->value . PHP_EOL; – Saymon Dec 01 '15 at 19:45
can you please provide the error you are getting? meanwhile try removing PHP_EOL from the end of the statements, for example : echo $img->attributes->getNamedItem('src')->value – thepiyush13 Dec 01 '15 at 20:46

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 09 '15 at 18:50

With PHP and regexp, I would do it in multiple steps.

First get the img and the plain text:

preg_match('/(<img.*?>)(.*)</i', $line, $m);
list($x, $img, $plain_text) = $m;
// Bug: This assumes the plain text does not include any tags (eg, <B>).

This avoids worrying about the order of the attributes and other things that might let it go past the >.

Then get each attribute separately (since they are unordered and optional):

preg_match('/ src=(".*?"|\'.*?\'|.*?)[ >]/i', $img, $m);
$src = $m[1];
// Bug:  If the whitespace is a new-line, this won't work correctly.
// Bug:  It fails to remove the outer quotes, if any.

and ditto for each other desired attribute.

(See how much things like domDocument do for you!)

How to Extract IMG tag, value and text from a string with PHP

3 Answers3