Stripping whitespace and dot from hyperlinks

Question

I am trying to remove whitespace and dot from hyperlinks all rules are working fine except its not removing dot from url. Here are few examples

 <a href="   http://www.example.com   ">example site</a>
 <a href="   http://www.example.com">example 2</a>
 <a href="http://www.example.com.">final example</a>


  $text = preg_replace('/<a href="([\s]+)?([^ "\']*)([\s]+)?(\.)?">([^<]*)<\/a>/', '<a href="\\2">\\5</a>', $text);

In the last example RE should remove dot from url. Dot is optional so I wrote this rule (.)?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags — Ben Rowe, Nov 29 '11 at 23:30

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 29 '11 at 23:27

1

How about <a href="([\s]+)?([^ "\']*\.[a-zA-Z]{2,5})([\s]+)?(\.)?">([^<]*)<\/a>? .[a-zA-Z]{2,5}?

It will catch .com, .info, .edu and even something like .com.au

answered Nov 29 '11 at 23:27

Seyeong Jeong

10,658
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Thanks it works perfect for urls like http://xyz.com but it will not work for http://xyz.com/another-page I am trying to fix your RE – Maximus Nov 29 '11 at 23:59

pronvit · Accepted Answer · 2011-11-29T23:35:45.177

1

Because your dot is already matched by ([^ "\']*) group.

Change it to ([^ "\']*?) - ungreedy version.

And also I suggest you to replace ([\s]+)?(\.)? with [\s.]* to handle "www.example.com. " strings.

edited Nov 29 '11 at 23:35

answered Nov 29 '11 at 23:30

pronvit

4,169
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27

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 30 '11 at 00:22

This will trim up the hrefs (I asume you mean to trim them).

for both '" value delimeters (expanded):

(<a \s+ href \s* = \s*)
(?|
     (") \s* ([^"]*?) [\.\s]* (")
  |  (') \s* ([^']*?) [\.\s]* (')
)
([^>]*>)

replacement is: $1$2$3$4$5

or,

for just " value delimeter (expanded):

(<a \s+ href \s* = \s* ")
\s* 
([^"]*?)
[\.\s]*
(" [^>]*>)

replacement is: $1$2$3

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Nov 29 '11 at 23:35

The following is un-tested.

$doc = new DOMDocument;
$doc->preserveWhiteSpace = false;
$doc->Load('source.html');

$xpath = new DOMXPath($doc);

// We starts from the root element
$query = 'a';

$anchors = $xpath->query('a');

foreach($anchors as $aElement) {
    $aElement->setAttribute('href', trim($aElement->getAttribute('href'), ' .'));
}

$doc->saveHTMLFile('new-source.html');

Stripping whitespace and dot from hyperlinks

4 Answers4