Question

I would like to add links around image tags with preg_replace().

Before:

<img href="" src="" alt="" />

After:

<a href="" ..><img href="" src="" alt="" /></a>

I would greatly appreciate any help. Thank you very much.

Answer 1

Would this help?

$str = '<img href="" src="" alt="" />';

preg_replace('/(<img[^>]+>)/', '<a href="" ...>$1</a>', $str));

Also, preg_replace_callback gives you great power in terms of dynamically determining the actual contents of the <a> tag.

EDIT: To safeguard against the flaw @Amber pointed out, this pattern should help:

'#(<img[^>]+ alt="[^"]*" />)#'

YMMV with that, depending on the uniformity of your <img> tags. Is alt always present and the last attribute, with single spaces around etc.

EDIT: Re: copying img’s src to a’s href:

preg_replace('#(<img[^>]+ src="([^"]*)" alt="[^"]*" />)#', '<a href="$2" ...>$1</a>', $str)

And again .. this is expecting uniformity from your original img tags. If they are created by you, you may be good as is. If not, you’ll want to safeguard against missing attributes, varying order, double vs single quotes etc.