Question

I have a string that has some hyperlinks inside. I want to match with regex only certain link from all of them. I can’t know if the href or the class comes first, it may be vary.
This is for example a sting:

<div class='wp-pagenavi'>
<span class='pages'>Page 1 of 8</span><span class='current'>1</span>
<a href='http://stv.localhost/channel/political/page/2' class='page'>2</a>     
<a href='http://stv.localhost/channel/political/page/3' class='page'>3</a>ccccc<a href='http://stv.localhost/channel/political/page/4' class='page'>4</a><a href='http://stv.localhost/channel/political/page/5' class='page'>5</a><a href="http://stv.localhost/channel/political/page/2" class="nextpostslink">»eee</a><span class='extend'>...</span><a href='http://stv.localhost/channel/political/page/8' class='last'>lastן »</a>
<a class="cccc">xxx</a>
</div>

I want to select from the aboce string only the one that has the class nextpostslink
So, the match in this example should return this –

<a href="http://stv.localhost/channel/political/page/2" class="nextpostslink">»eee</a>

This regex is the most close I could get –

/<a\s?(href=)?('|")(.*)('|") class=('|")nextpostslink('|")>.{1,6}<\/a>/

But it is selecting the links from the start of the string.
I think my problem is in the (.*) , but I can’t figure out how to change this to select only the needed link.

I would appreciate your help.

Answer 1

It’s much better to use a genuine HTML parser for this. Abandon all attempts to use regular expressions on HTML.

Use PHP’s DOMDocument instead:

$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadHTML($yourHTML);

foreach ($dom->getElementsByTagName('a') as $link) {
    $classes = explode(' ', $link->getAttribute('class'));

    if (in_array('nextpostslink', $classes)) {
        // $link has the class "nextpostslink"
    }
}