Get the HREF from a link with a specific class

Question

<a data-track='' _sp= class=s-item__link href=get_this_href>...</a>

With the above link, the data-track contains some json data. The _sp= could contain numbers/letters and a period (.). The class is s-item__link.

I would need the get_this_href and then I can go from there.

This is the regex I tried... but im stuck from here.

<a\b(?=[^>]* class="[^"]*(?<=[" ])s-item__link[" ])(?=[^>]* href="([^"]*))

Here is an example: https://regex101.com/r/rVPeUI/1

$link = ""; //url im scraping
$html = file_get_html($link);
//find is part of simple_html_dom.php. im saying each li item is an $item.

foreach ($html->find('li.s-item    ') as $item) {
    //$item contains the decent amount of nested divs with spans and links.
}

what is `$html`? What is `find()`? What is `$item`? Is this a string, an object instance? IMO, you shouldn't be using regex for this, the answer you've got below is perfect. — But those new buttons though.., Oct 16 '20 at 02:59
I've heard of simple_html_dom.php but can't say I've ever used it. looks to me like you could easily use domdocument and xpath to do this (as suggested by @Wasif) and abandon your 3rd party library. it's only a slight modification to your code. — But those new buttons though.., Oct 16 '20 at 03:11
Does this answer your question? [Grabbing the href attribute of an A element](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3820666/grabbing-the-href-attribute-of-an-a-element) — But those new buttons though.., Oct 16 '20 at 03:17

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 16 '20 at 02:51

2

Without using Regex, its better to use DOMDocument() to parse HTML tags:

$doc = DOMDocument::loadHTML($html);
$xpath = new DOMXPath($doc);
$query = "//a[@class='s-item__link']";
$entries = $xpath->query($query);
foreach ($entries as $entry) {
  echo "HREF " . $entry->getAttribute("href");
}

answered Oct 16 '20 at 02:51

Wasif

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Thank you for your response. This doesnt play with with the current code I have. I am looping through a UL tag. I will update my question with this code. – letsCode Oct 16 '20 at 02:55

Get the HREF from a link with a specific class

1 Answers1