Question

I need to extract the first URL from some content. The content may be like this:

({items:[{url:"http://cincinnati.ebayclassifieds.com/",name:"Cincinnati"},{url:"http://dayton.ebayclassifieds.com/",name:"Dayton"}],error:null}); 

or may contain only a link

({items:[{url:"http://portlandor.ebayclassifieds.com/",name:"Portland (OR)"}],error:null}); 

currently I have :

$pattern = "/\:\[\{url\:\"(.*)\"\,name/";
preg_match_all($pattern, $htmlContent, $matches);
$URL = $matches[1][0];

however it works only if there is a single link so I need a regex which should work for the both cases.

Answer 1

You can use this REGEX:

$pattern = "/url\:\"([^\"]+)\"/";

Worked for me 🙂