Question

I can’t seem to figure out the proper regular expression for extracting just specific numbers from a string. I have an HTML string that has various img tags in it. There are a bunch of img tags in the HTML that I want to extract a portion of the value from. They follow this format:

<img src="http://domain.com/images/59.jpg" class="something" />
<img src="http://domain.com/images/549.jpg" class="something" />
<img src="http://domain.com/images/1249.jpg" class="something" />
<img src="http://domain.com/images/6.jpg" class="something" />

So, varying lengths of numbers before what ‘usually’ is a .jpg (it may be a .gif, .png, or something else too). I want to only extract the number from that string.

The 2nd part of this is that I want to use that number to look up an entry in a database and grab the alt/title tag for that specific id of image. Lastly, I want to add that returned database value into the string and throw it back into the HTML string.

Any thoughts on how to proceed with it would be great…

Thus far, I’ve tried:

$pattern = '/img src="http://domain.com/images/[0-9]+\/.jpg';
preg_match_all($pattern, $body, $matches);
var_dump($matches);

Answer 1

I think this is the best approach:

1. Use an HTML parser to extract the image tags
2. Use a regular expression (or perhaps string manipulation) to extract the ID
3. Query for the data
4. Use the HTML parser to insert the returned data

Here is an example. There are improvements I can think of, such as using string manipulation instead of a regex.

$html = '<img src="http://domain.com/images/59.jpg" class="something" />
<img src="http://domain.com/images/549.jpg" class="something" />
<img src="http://domain.com/images/1249.jpg" class="something" />
<img src="http://domain.com/images/6.jpg" class="something" />';
$doc = new DOMDocument;
$doc->loadHtml( $html);

foreach( $doc->getElementsByTagName('img') as $img)
{
    $src = $img->getAttribute('src');
    preg_match( '#/images/([0-9]+)\.#i', $src, $matches);
    $id = $matches[1];
    echo 'Fetching info for image ID ' . $id . "\n";

    // Query stuff here
    $result = 'Got this from the DB';

    $img->setAttribute( 'title', $result);
    $img->setAttribute( 'alt', $result);
}

$newHTML = $doc->saveHtml();