Question

I search for images in a forum post with this PHP code:

if(preg_match("~<img.*src=\"(.*)\".*/>~isU", $htmltext, $imatch))
{
    $imageurl = $imatch[1];
}

This will find the first image in the htmltext.
However, I want to skip any images that are smilie icons. All the smilie icons rest in the folder /forum/smilies/.
How can I exclude this folder from the regular expression?

Answer 1

It is not recommended to use regex when you try to parse HTML. You can take a look at this answer on this same problem.

This will do the trick:

$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadHTML($htmltext);
$images = $dom->getElementsByTagName('img');
$valid  = array();
foreach ($images as $image) {
    $src = $image->getAttribute('src');
    if ($src !== '' && strpos($src, '/forum/smilies/') !== 0) {
        $valid[] = $src;
    }
}
print_r($valid);

$valid is an array containing all non-similey img‘s src within the given $htmltext.