I tried to change all links to nofollow etc. before they are posted to the db

Question

I tried to change all links in a php string to nofollow etc. before they are posted to the mysql db.

Both lines I tried did not work:

$group_description = preg_replace('/\b<a href="\b/', '<a rel="nofollow" href="/out/out.php?url=', $group_description);

$group_description = str_replace('<a href="', '<a rel="nofollow" href="/out/out.php?url=', $group_description);

Both Result in: <a href="%5C%22http://www.website.net%5C%22">keyword</a>

1. Don't mangle data going into the database. Mangle it on the way out. (Keep a cache column if you want performance). — Quentin, Apr 03 '12 at 16:23
2. Don't try to parse HTML with [regular expressions](http://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/19068)! (Especially when it isn't HTML that fits a very standard template). — Quentin, Apr 03 '12 at 16:23
@Quentin Is there a alternative to str_replace or preg_replace in this case? — user1293881, Apr 03 '12 at 16:36

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 11 '12 at 06:26

You can use DomDocument to do this:

$html = '<a href="/foo">foo</a> <a href="/bar">bar</a>';

$dom = new DomDocument();
$dom->loadHTML($html);

$as = $dom->getElementsByTagName('a');
foreach($as as $a) {
  $a->setAttribute('rel', 'nofollow');
  $a->setAttribute('href', '/out/out.php?url=' . rawurlencode($a->getAttribute('href')));
}

$out = simplexml_import_dom($dom->getElementsByTagName('body')->item(0))->asXML();
$out = preg_replace('#<body>(.*)</body>#', "$1", $out);
echo $out;

I'm not thrilled with the last 3 lines, but that part mostly depends on how you want to use the final output, as a fragment, or a complete HTML document. The above pulls out a fragment, though there are likely better ways to do that. Otherwise you can just use $dom->asHTML();

I tried to change all links to nofollow etc. before they are posted to the db

1 Answers1