Question

$str = 'href="http://grego.com" href="httpxoobar" href="xxx" href="ZZZZZ"';

preg_match_all('/http:\/\/(?<!href=")([\s\S]+)"/', $str,$m);


print_r($m);

I’m trying this code.

I want to create 4 matches, I want to match all the href=” that doesn’t have “http://” after it, and then get what is inside the href=”(this)” (I’m using \s\S because it may contain new lines) and when it finds a quote ( ” ) it stops and keep fetching the next (that in this case is in the same line),

in this example it should bring all 4 results.

how do I do that? Thanks.

Answer 1

You’ve got things a bit mixed up.

• You’ve made http:// part of the match although you’re writing that you don’t want to match it,
• you’re using a negative lookbehind where a positive one would make sense,
• you’re not using the /s option to allow the dot to match newlines,
• you’re using a greedy quantifier that will match too much, and
• you’re using regexes to match HTML.

That said, you might get away with this:

(?<=href=")(?!http://)[^"]+

i. e. in PHP:

preg_match_all(
    '%(?<=href=") # Assert position right after href="
    (?!http://)   # Assert that http:// is not right ahead
    [^"]+         # Match one or more characters until the next "
    %x', 
    $subject, $result, PREG_PATTERN_ORDER);
$result = $result[0];