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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-13T13:31:14+00:00

I’ve read a few questions on here re parsing HTML with regex, and I

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I’ve read a few questions on here re parsing HTML with regex, and I understand that this is, on the whole, a terrible idea.

Having said this, I have a very specific problem that I think Regex might be the answer to. I’ve been fumbling around trying to work out the answer but I’m new (today) to Regex, and I was hoping some kind hearted person may be able to help me out.

I have an array of strings that always follow the format

STUFF HERE<a href="somewhere" title="something" target="_blank">name of thing</a>STUFF HERE

What I’m hoping to achieve is to be left with just the ‘somewhere’ and the ‘name of thing, so that I can output just <a href="somewhere">name of thing</a>.

The array of strings comes from an RSS feed of links on my Facebook profile, if you happen to be interested.

Many, many thanks for any help.

Jack

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team
    $str = 'STUFF HERE<a href="somewhere" title"something" target="_blank">name of thing</a>STUFF HERE';
$success = preg_match('/.*href=\"([^\"]+)\".*>([^<]+)<.*/i', $str, $matches);
if ($success) {
    echo $matches[1];
    echo $matches[2];
} else {
    echo "Parsing failed.";
}

    The parenthetical clauses isolate portions of the match for the $matches array. If the pattern matches the string at all, then $matches[1] would contain your href and $matches[2] would contain your link text.

    Inside the parenthesis, I’m defining the meat of those segments you’re interested with exclusion characters. The first one is [^\”]+, which is one-or-more of any character except double quote. The latter is [^<]+, which is one or more of any character except less than. This ensures that, if the markup is consistently in the format you provided, then you have well-defined boundaries on either side of the portions you’re interested in.

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