Writing regular expression in PHP to wrap with

Question

I want to make it so that any occurance of an image gets wrapped with a link to the image source

How can I write a pattern, in PHP so that I can find these variations, which are scattered throughout text coming from the database:

<img src='/dir/dir2/image1.jpg' alt='blah blah blah'>
<img src="/dir/dir2/image2.jpg" alt="blah blah blah" />
<img src="/dir/dir2/image3.jpg" />

In all cases, I want them to appear within an link.

Obligatory: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454 :) (In your case it's probably manageable, but Cthulu still applies.) — deceze, Dec 16 '10 at 02:00

score 23 · Accepted Answer · edited Dec 16 '10 at 02:46

23

preg_replace("{<img\\s*(.*?)src=('.*?'|\".*?\"|[^\\s]+)(.*?)\\s*/?>}ims", '<a href=$2><img $1src=$2 $3/></a>', $str)

handles all non-practical cases

alt text

edited Dec 16 '10 at 02:46

Trufa

answered Dec 16 '10 at 02:08

Ming-Tang

Thanks SHiNKiROU you are my hero – gio Dec 16 '10 at 02:23
7

Aghghghghhhh!!! Regex-based HTML parsing! – Jonah Aug 03 '16 at 17:45
2

[You dare violate the rules of bobince](https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/9642811) – MilkyWay90 Feb 08 '19 at 01:40
bugged, as a regex approach is bound to be. this regex fails on `` , it will link to the liecense rather than the image. seriously, use a friggin html parser, like DOMDocument. – hanshenrik Aug 01 '21 at 19:43

score 11 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 16 '10 at 02:00

11

My I recommend the PHP DOM with loadHTML() instead of regex?

answered Dec 16 '10 at 02:00

Jonah

score 7 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 16 '10 at 02:07

7

May I recommend using jQuery and use this snippet instead, it should be easier (and we all love jQuery to brute-force any problem ;] )

$('img').wrap( function(){ return '<a href="' + this.src + '"></a>'; });

or is it

$('img').wrap( function(){ return '<a href="' + $(this).attr('src') + '"></a>'; });

Anyways, fun times to be had, using jQuery to manipulate the DOM clientside ;)

answered Dec 16 '10 at 02:07

jcolebrand

3

I'm upvoting the other two for actually using PHP to fix the problem, but seriously, DOM element wrapping like this is pretty easy in jQuery, requires little effort on your part, and allows you to more tightly focus the areas to be "altered" if you suddenly decide that ... for instance, header images ... don't need to be selected. I'm not saying mine is necessarily the way to go, but just pointing out that there are some benefits to the awkward solution. – jcolebrand Dec 16 '10 at 02:17
Related: *[jQuery](http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19478/the-many-memes-of-meta/19492#19492)* – Peter Mortensen Jul 22 '16 at 21:07

3 Answers3