Question

I have a bunch of strings, each containing an anchor tag and url.

string ex.

here is a link <a href="http://www.google.com">http://www.google.com</a>. enjoy!

i want to parse out the anchor tags and everything in between.

result ex.

here is a link. enjoy!

the urls in the href= portion don’t always match the link text however (sometimes there are shortened urls,sometimes just descriptive text).

i’m having an extremely difficult time figuring out how to do this with either regular expressions or php functions. how can i parse an entire anchor tag/link from a string?

thanks!

Answer 1

You shouldn’t use regex to parse html and use an html parser instead.

But if you should use regex, and your anchor tags inner contents are guaranteed to be free of html like </a>, and each string is guaranteed to contain only one anchor tag as in the example case, then – only then – you can use something like:

Replacing /^(.+)<a.+<\/a>(.+)$/ with $1$2