Question

I need to do some cleanup on strings that look like this:

$author_name = '<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Jones_Burdette>Robert Jones Burdette </a>';

Notice the href tag doesn’t have closing quotes – I’m using the DOMParser on a large table of these to extract the text, and it borks on this.

I would like to look at the string in $author_name;

IF the first > does NOT have a ” before it, replace it with “> to close the tag correctly. If it is okay, just skip and do the next step. Be sure not to replace the second > at all.

Using php regex, I haven’t been able to find a working solution – I could chop up the whole thing and check its parts, but that would be slow and I think there must be a regex that can do what I want.

TIA

Answer 1

What you can do is, find the first closing tag, with or without the double-quote (“), and replace it with (“>):

$author_name = preg_replace('/(.+?)"?>(.+?)/', '$1">$2', $author_name);