Question

I need some help to tweak this regular expression:

$content = 'more <a href="http://www.test.com">test</a> test <a href="mailto:[e-mail]">Jeff</a> this is a <a href="http://www.test.com">test</a>';

$content = preg_replace("~<a .*?href=[\'|\"]mailto:(.*?)[\'|\"].*?>.*?</a>~", "$1", $content); 

This expression is to strip the html markup off a mailto link and just return the email ([e-mail])

It works fine except for in the example I gave above – because a unlimited number of whitespaces is allowed before the href in the pattern, when a website link is before the mailto link, the regex looks all the way forward until it finds the mailto: in the following link and removes all the content in between.

maybe a fix would be to just limit it to two or three whitespaces after the opening tag so as to not look so far ahead, but i wonder if there is a better solution from people who know regex better than I?

Answer 1

The problem is not to allow any amount of whitespace, that would be working. The problem is you allow one space and any amount of ANY character with your <a .*

If you fix this and allow really only whitespace like this

<a\s+href=[\'|\"]mailto:(.*?)[\'|\"].*?>.*?</a>

it seems to work.

See it here at Regexr

But probably you should have a closer look at alex answer (+1 for the example) as this would be the cleaner solution.