Question

I am using the following preg_replace() call to replace links with a new structure:

preg_replace('/example.com\/sub-dir\/(.*)">/', 'newsite.co.uk/sub-dir/$1.html">', $links);

It almost works, except it doesn’t add on the “.html” to the end of the replace, so it ends up as something like “newsite.co.uk/sub-dir/page-identifier” rather than “newsite.co.uk/sub-dir/page-identifier.html”.

I am sure it’s something simple that I am missing, however Googling the problem hasn’t come up with any useful results so I am hoping someone here can help!

Thanks in advance!

Edit: as an example, here is a link side of $links

<a href="http://example.com/sub-dir/the-identifier">Anchor</a>

The above example works if I changed the regext to (.*?) however the below doesn’t:

<a class="prodCatThumb" title="View product" href="http://example.com/sub-dir/product-identifier">

It ends up as

<a class="prodCatThumb.html" title="View product" href="http://example.com/sub-dir/product-identifier">

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Yes, it’s about .*
Just add ? to that like so: .*?

example:

<?php
    $links = "example.com/sub-dir/myfile.php";
    $links = preg_replace('/example.com\/sub-dir\/(.*?)/', 'newsite.co.uk/sub-dir/$1.html', $links);
    echo $links;
?>

edit:
@Ashley: sure, the question mark makes the preceding token in the regular expression optional. E.g.: colou?r matches both colour and color (from this link).

But, additionaly when you use it with ? it’s the ungready method (this may help explaining: Regular expression with .*? (dot-star-questionmark) matches too much? or this: http://www.phpro.org/tutorials/Introduction-to-PHP-Regex.html)

So, to answer your qq:

<?php
    $links = '<a class="prodCatThumb" title="View product" href="example.com/sub-dir/product-identifier">';
    $links = preg_replace('/example.com\/sub-dir\/(.*?)"/', 'newsite.co.uk/sub-dir/$1.html"', $links);
    echo $links;
?>

the output for this link:
<a class="prodCatThumb" title="View product" href="example.com/sub-dir/product-identifier">
would now be:
<a class="prodCatThumb" title="View product" href="newsite.co.uk/sub-dir/product-identifier.html">