Question

I’m stuck trying to make a regex in PHP that catches the link and its content from a html page (which I have no control over) and replaces it with a link of mine.

i.e.:

<a style="position:absolute;more_styles:more;" href="http://www.google.co.il/" class="something">This is the content</a>

Becomes:

<a style="position:absolute;more_styles:more;" href="my_function('http://www.google.co.il/')" class="something">This is the content</a>

This is the regex that I wrote:

$content = preg_replace('|<a(.*?)href=[\"\'](.*?)[\"\'][^>]*>(.*?)</a>|i','$3',$content);

This works well with all the links except links like:

<a href="http://google.co.il" onclick="if(MSIE_VER()>=4){this.style.behavior='url(#default#homepage)';this.setHomePage('http://www.google.co.il')}" class='brightgrey rightbar' style='font-size:12px'><b>Make me the home page!</b></a>

Obviously, the regexp stops at “MSIE_VER()>” because of the “[^>]*” part and i get the wrong content when I use “$3”.

I tried almost every option to make this work but no luck.

Any thoughts?

Thank you all in advance..

Answer 1

First of all your code is trying to do something different that to add my_function – it tries to remove the starting tag and replace it with url only. There are several ways to acheieve your declared goal (i.e. substituing my_function to all hrefs) , the most pragmafic would be:

$content = preg_replace('|href=[\"\'](.*?)[\"\']|i',"href=\"my_function('$1')\"",$content);

if you need more prudent approach than I would use

$content = preg_replace('|(<a.*?)href=[\"\'](.*?)[\"\'](.*?</a>)|i',"$1href=\"my_function('$2')\"$3",$content);

last but not least if you need removing tag rather than what you have written, let me know there is million ways to do it.