Question

I would like to get the SRC attribute into a variable in this example:

<img border="0" src="/images/image.jpg" alt="Image" width="100" height="100" />

So for example – I would like to get a variable $foo = "/images/image.jpg".
Important! The src attribute will be dynamic, so it mustn’t be hardcoded.
Is there any quick and easy way to do this?

Thanks!

EDIT: The image will be a part of a huge string that is basically the content of a news story. So the image is just a part of that.

EDIT2: There will be more images in this string, and I would only want to get the src of the first one. Is this possible?

Answer 1

Use a HTML parser like DOMDocument and then evaluate the value you’re looking for with DOMXpath:

$html = '<img id="12" border="0" src="/images/image.jpg"
         alt="Image" width="100" height="100" />';

$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTML($html);
$xpath = new DOMXPath($doc);
$src = $xpath->evaluate("string(//img/@src)"); # "/images/image.jpg"

Or for those who really need to save space:

$xpath = new DOMXPath(@DOMDocument::loadHTML($html));
$src = $xpath->evaluate("string(//img/@src)");

And for the one-liners out there:

$src = (string) reset(simplexml_import_dom(DOMDocument::loadHTML($html))->xpath("//img/@src"));