Question

I’m trying to write a RegEx which finds all links on a webpage with the rel=”nofollow” attribute. Mind you, I’m a RegEx newb so please don’t be to harsh on me 🙂

This is what I got so far:

$link = "/<a href=\"([^\"]*)\" rel=\"nofollow\">(.*)<\/a>/iU";

Obviously this is very flawed. Any link with any other attribute or styled a little differently (single quotes) won’t be matched.

Answer 1

You should really use DOM parser for this purpose as any regex based solution will be error prone for this kind of HTML parsing. Consider code like this:

$doc = new DOMDocument();
libxml_use_internal_errors(true);
$doc->loadHTML($html); // loads your html
$xpath = new DOMXPath($doc);
// returns a list of all links with rel=nofollow
$nlist = $xpath->query("//a[@rel='nofollow']");