Question

Im working with wordpress and this function im using returns this or something that looks like this:

<li><a href="http://foo.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/picture.png">picture</a></li>

What Im trying to do is get the HREF from that tag and store it in a variable, so I can manipulate it easily. Then after i have the HREF info i want to discard of the <li> and the <a> tag.

I looked into the php function strip_tag() and that doesn’t do what i want.

If this is overly complicated i will just not include the work in the webpage, but if it can be done.. help would be great.

Answer 1

First of all, make sure no other function exists that returns the unformatted data.

If not, here’s a quick and dirty regex to pull out the URL:

$str = '<li><a href="http://foo.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/picture.png">picture</a></li>';

preg_match('~\shref="([^"]++)"~', $str, $matches);
$url = $matches[1];