Question

If this is the string
example

     $str = 'this is a string of chars <a href="http://www.asd.com\">Anchor Text</a>';

i am doing this method to clean the input

     $res = get_magic_quotes_gpc() ? stripslashes($str) : $str;
     $res = mysql_real_escape_string($res);

and this code to extract url

   preg_match('#href\s*?=\s*?[\'"]?([^\'"]*)[\'"]?#i', $input, $captures);                
   $href = $captures[1];

But i come up with this result

   "\"http://www.asd.com\""

string with 2 double quotes and backslash.

where i want that

http://www.asd.com

Answer 1

Simply, do not use regexp. It takes long to create and even longer to debug.

$str = 'this is a string of chars <a href="http://www.asd.com\">Anchor Text</a>';
$start = strpos($str, '<a href="') + strlen('<a href="');
$end = strpos($str, '">', $start);
substr($str, $start, $end-$start);

http://codepad.org/w370PJoz