Question

How could I use RegEx to find <a class="modal> and replace it with <a class="modal-link" ?

I tried:

preg_replace('/<a class="(.*?)">(.*?)<\/a>/i', '<a class="$1-link">$2</a>', $input);

but it’s not working. Please can someone point me out to the right solution ?

By the way: I’am styling Joomla 2.5 frontpage edit content page, where the approved user can post an article. That string where i want to apply on my regex comes from:

<?php echo $this->form->getInput('image_intro', 'images'); ?>

it generates this HTML:

<a class="modal" ...>Choose</a>

Answer 1

A non-regex based solution using PHP’s DOMDocument class would be:

// Load up the HTML in DOMDocument
$doc = new DOMDocument;
$doc->loadHTML( '<a class="modal">Stuff</a>'); // Or: $doc->loadHTML( $this->form->getInput('image_intro', 'images'));

// Create a new XPath object to find the correct <a> tags
$xpath = new DOMXPath( $doc);

// Iterate over all <a class="modal"> tags
foreach( $xpath->query( "//a[@class='modal']") as $a) {
    // Set the class attribute correctly
    $a->setAttribute( 'class', $a->getAttribute( 'class') . '-link');
    echo $doc->saveHTML( $a); // Print the fixed <a> tag
}

This will output something similar to:

<a class="modal-link">Stuff</a>

This method is more robust and stable than a regular expression based approach, especially if you’re getting HTML from user input.