Question

If I have the following HTML code:

<ul>
  <li>
    <a href="/link1/">link 1</a>
  </li>
  <li>
    <a href="/link2/">link 2</a>
  </li>
...
</ul>

How can I use PHP to return an array containing the contents of all the href’s?

ex:

$array[0]="/link1/";
$array[1]="/link2/";

and so on.

Answer 1

You can use DOMDocument along with DOMXpath (plus this reference or this chart) to extract just about anything from the HTML:

$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadHTML('<ul>
  <li><a href="/link1/">link 1</a></li>
  <li><a href="/link2/">link 2</a></li>
</ul>');
$xpath = new DOMXpath($dom);
$links = array();
foreach($xpath->query("//ul//a[@href]") as $a) {
    $links[] = $a->getAttribute("href");
}
var_dump($links);

// array(2) {
//   [0]=>
//   string(7) "/link1/"
//   [1]=>
//   string(7) "/link2/"
// }

Change loadHTML($string) to loadHTMLFile($path_or_url) to load contents from a file.