Question

How do I select http://test.com/ out of this HTML:
<a target="_new" href="http://test.com/" title="test">$293.00</a>

I realize I should use a DOM parser, however its for a few lines of code and I’d rather just use regex.

I’ve tried this with no success:

preg_match('/(http|https)\:\/\/[a-zA-Z0-9\-\.]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,3}(\/\S*)?/', $html, $url);   

Thanks.

Answer 1

You can solve this with lookarounds:

if (preg_match('/(?<=href=").*?(?=")/', $html, $groups)) {
    $url = $groups[0];
} else {
    $url = "";
}

• (?<=href=") means: find a position immediately after href="
• Then match anything, but as little as possible with .*? — this is saved in groups[0]
• Stop, when you found a position where the next character is "