What's the fastest way to insert a string before the </a> tag?
<a href="..."> bla bla... </a>
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How is your HTML being constructed? – Major Productions Dec 03 '10 at 21:24
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1can you give a little bit of context ? why not replacing "" with "my string appended" ? – Jerome WAGNER Dec 03 '10 at 21:24
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*(related)* [Best Methods to parse HTML](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3577641/best-methods-to-parse-html/3577662#3577662) – Gordon Dec 03 '10 at 21:24
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the link is a string variable. actually I have a set of links. – Alex Dec 03 '10 at 21:25
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1Can you edit your post to show us a code example of how you actually build these links? Are they entirely strings? Is the text within the tags passed in as a parameter, or is the entire link just raw text? – Major Productions Dec 03 '10 at 21:28
3 Answers
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str_replace("</a>", "blabla</a>", $text);
code_burgar
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Yeah, because there is no attempts to parse the (nonexistent in this case) regular expression. – code_burgar Dec 03 '10 at 21:32
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@Alex: Why do you care? Is this code going to run millions of times per second? Isn't it more important for you to find a solution that always works, rather than one that works most of the time but is faster? – Mark Byers Dec 03 '10 at 21:32
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no, it's just for a menu with 30-40 links, but it doesn't hurt to use the fastest method for this :) – Alex Dec 03 '10 at 21:34
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@Mark Byers: are you suggesting that somehow str_replace("", "blabla", $text) would be less reliable than preg_replace("", "blabla", $text)? – code_burgar Dec 03 '10 at 21:36
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@code_burgar: No, I think both suggestions have the same problem (they both don't work in edge cases). I'm just wondering why the OP thinks speed is more important than correctness. And why this is even a sensible question to ask in the first place... seems like a bad design IMHO, but I could be wrong... there may be a sensible reason to do this, I just can't think of it. – Mark Byers Dec 03 '10 at 21:43
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There are many, many ways to skin this cat, but here are a few common ones:
IN HTML:
<a href=""><?php echo $foo; ?></a>
<a href=""><?=$foo?></a>
IN PHP
echo "<a href=\"\">$foo</a>";
echo "<a href=\"\">{$foo}</a>";
echo "<a href=\"\">". $foo ."</a>";
Edit, you said "fastest", which I overlooked
Assuming we are talking about PHP, specifically: Supposedly using the comma for string concatenation in php is one of the fastest ways to build a string. But unless you are doing this an awful lot, this seems like an optimization that won't buy you very much.
echo "<a href=\"\">", $foo ,"</a>";
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