Php match from center

Question

I have string like below:

<a href="test1.com">test1</a><a href="test2.com">test2</a>

And my regex is like below:

<a href=(.*?)test2.com(.*?)<\/a>

and my php code:

preg_match('/<a href=(.*?)test2.com(.*?)<\/a>/s',$game,$mat);

So I want to match this whole thing <a href="test2.com">test2</a> , but instead its matching from the beginning of <a href and I get following:

<a href="test1.com">test1</a><a href="test2.com">test2</a>

How do I match from test2.com and match till first left and first right occurances.

[Don't parse HTML with regular expressions](https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/522479) — Cobra_Fast, Apr 11 '18 at 14:31
This seems painfully prone to issues. Have you considered the [`DOMDocument`](http://php.net/manual/en/domdocument.loadhtml.php#example-6357) class? — MonkeyZeus, Apr 11 '18 at 14:34
I thought learning , html DOM for this simple thing is waste of time .. check mrzasa solution is simple and perfect. — Gracie williams, Apr 11 '18 at 14:42
If I want some deep parsing , I will ofcourse learn DOMdocument ,thank you. — Gracie williams, Apr 11 '18 at 14:55

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 11 '18 at 14:32

2

Use

<a href=([^<]*)test2.com([^<]*)<\/a>

Demo

Using [^<] instead of .*? assures that repetition will match only text to next html tag (starting with <). Greedy operator with negated class is also faster than lazy operator with dot.

answered Apr 11 '18 at 14:32

mrzasa

22,895
11
56
94

Php match from center

1 Answers1