Question

I am looking to try an determine a regular expression to parse out the interior url from this google alert redirect

http://www.google.com/url?sa=X&q=http://weheartit.com/entry/29409069&ct=ga&cad=CAcQARgAIAEoATAAOABAo5aK_gRIAlgBYgVlbi1VUw&cd=jRWL16jvo8k&usg=AFQjCNGbJMqWtbCxpcJdu4PGD6RToU6NTw

What I need to do is remove the first part that is

http://www.google.com/url?sa=X&q=

And I would also remove the trailing string which is

&ct=ga&cad=CAcQARgAIAEoATAAOABAo5aK_gRIAlgBYgVlbi1VUw&cd=jRWL16jvo8k&usg=AFQjCNGbJMqWtbCxpcJdu4PGD6RToU6NTw

So the ending url I would end with is

http://weheartit.com/entry/29409069

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I just wanted to update this thanks for the help. This was an issue in the link module for drupal and it has been fixed

Answer 1

Still unclear what you are trying to accomplish, whether it’s extracting or removal of the surrounding parts, it’s not really difficult:

preg_match('#q=(http://[^&]+)#', $source, $result);
print $result[1];

Or otherwise:

= preg_replace('#^.+q=([^&]+).+$#', '$1', $source);

Would work.

• See also Open source RegexBuddy alternatives and Online regex testing for some helpful tools, or RegExp.info for a nicer tutorial.

And again, the alternative lies in parse_url and parse_str