Regex - get href value from a tag

Question

I want to get value from a href.

Here is the HTML I am working with:

<div class="streeet"> 
  <b>Name:</b>wwww<br />
  <b>Post Code:</b>97
  <b>City:</b>
  <a href="/bar-fan-pers.html" title="abcd">VALUE</a> 
  <br />
</div>

I am trying to use preg_match_all:

preg_match_all('/<div\s*class=\"walldetsleft\">[^>]*<a\s*href=\"[^>]*\"\s[^\>]*>(.*?)<\/a>/', $url, $val);

It does not work - the output is just an empty array. How can I write a regex to do this?

HTML DOM is parsed with html parsers. Parsing it with regex is generally a bad idea. — Mohammad Yusuf, Dec 04 '16 at 07:49
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454 — melpomene, Dec 04 '16 at 07:51

But those new buttons though.. · Answer 1 · 2016-12-04T08:29:08.907

This isn't the regex you asked for but it's what I recommend:

$html = '
<div class="streeet"> 
  <b>Name:</b>wwww<br />
  <b>Post Code:</b>97
  <b>City:</b>
  <a href="/bar-fan-pers.html" title="abcd">VALUE</a> 
  <br />
</div>';

// handle parsing errors yourself
libxml_use_internal_errors(true);
// instantiate new `DOMDocument` object
$dom = new DOMDocument();
// load $html into `DOMDocument`
$dom->loadHTML($html);
// get all anchor elements
$elements = $dom->getElementsByTagName('a');
// iterate over anchors
foreach($elements as $element) {
    // get href attribute
    $href = $element->getAttribute('href');
    echo $href . PHP_EOL;
}

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 04 '16 at 08:29

You can do something like the following:

$doc = new DOMDocument;
 $source = '<div class="streeet"> 
  <b>Name:</b>wwww<br />
  <b>Post Code:</b>97
  <b>City:</b>
  <a href="/bar-fan-pers.html" title="abcd">VALUE</a> 
  <br />
</div>';
 $doc->loadHTML($source);     
 $out = $doc->getElementsByTagName('a')->item(0)->attributes->getNamedItem('href')->nodeValue;
echo $out;

Regex - get href value from a tag

2 Answers2