How do I modify this regular expression?

Question

I have the following format for emails on a page <a href='mailto:xyz@xyz.com'> that I am trying to match with a regex

I am currently using this:

$pattern = '#a[^>]+href="mailto:([^"]+)"[^>]*?>#is';
preg_match_all($pattern, $data, $matches);
foreach ($matches[1] as $key => $email) {
    $emails[] = $email;
}

but it results in no match. $emails is NULL.

I am just learning regular expressions so please forgive the question! Can someone explain why it doesn't work and suggest a change? Thanks

Well, when you **learn** something it is good when you write something **yourself**, from the scratch, not just modify the code you've found somewhere. Let's start solving the issue together, step by step, from the scratch (in case that you really want to *learn* something) — zerkms, Nov 11 '11 at 14:34
Please change the title of your question to be more meaningful to what you want to achieve before I change my mind and downvote just because of it. — Romain, Nov 11 '11 at 14:35
The HTML you posted has an `href` with single quotes whereas the regular expression uses double quotes. *(Insert obligatory rant about [parsing HTML with regex here](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags))* — Linus Kleen, Nov 11 '11 at 14:35
Use DOM and this XPath: `//a/@href[starts-with(., 'mailto:')]`. — Gordon, Nov 11 '11 at 14:43

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 11 '11 at 14:38

1

The problem is that you in your example use single qoutes ' whereas in the regex it's looking for double quotes ".

Changing your pattern to:

$pattern = '#a[^>]+href=\'mailto:([^\']+)\'[^>]*?>#is';

Would do the trick.

answered Nov 11 '11 at 14:38

Marcus

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SERPRO · Answer 2 · 2011-11-11T14:45:02.150

1

Just add the support for double an single quotes as @Linus-Kleen and @thetaiko said:

$pattern = '#a[^>]+href=[\'"]mailto:([^\'"]+)[\'"][^>]*?>#is';

edited Nov 11 '11 at 14:45

answered Nov 11 '11 at 14:40

SERPRO

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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 11 '11 at 14:39

The regex works, but you don't check for both ' (single quote) and " (double quote) so that

<a href='mailto:xyz@xyz.com'>

Will not get matched, but

<a href="mailto:xyz@xyz.com">

will.

Simply changing the regex to

'#a[^>]+href=[\'"]+mailto:([^"]+)[\'"]+[^>]*?>#is'

will do the trick!

How do I modify this regular expression?

3 Answers3