replacing all image src tags in HTML text

Question

Hi!

I'm trying to make a simple php script to find all src attributes from all images in a html text and then replace all found srcs with some text after making some conditional changes.

Something like this:

@preg_match_all('/<img\s src="([a-zA-Z0-9\.;:\/\?&=_|\r|\n]{1,})"/isxmU', $body, $images);

now i've all srcs into the $images variable, now i make:

foreach ($images as $img) {
    ..my changes here..
}

and now... how can i restore the changed srcs to the $body variable again??

many thanks in advance,

Answer 1

You should look into preg_replace_callback(), which will allow you to postprocess each match however you like, using a callback function. (You would use it instead of your preg_match_all(), not in addition to it.)

Answer 2

Don't what you want is to use preg_replace? With the e modifier the replacement text is eval'd so you can have a function that do on the text-to-be-replaced the same thing that you would have done in your foreach loop.

EDIT: preg_replace_callback is cleaner than using the e modifier with preg_replace, didn't thought of that while writing my anser, so chaos answer is better.

Answer 3

I think the easiest answer you're looking for is to do a str_replace.

foreach ($images as $img) {
    ..my changes here..
    $body = str_replace($original_string, $modified_string, $output_body);
}

Answer 4

Use a HTML DOM parser instead, much easier to use and maintain http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net/

Answer 5

A non-validating parser may be even better if you need to work with badly formed HTML.

http://pear.php.net/package/XML%5FHTMLSax3

Answer 6

I asked a question yesterday about a good interface for modifying and traversing HTML files. You may be interested in this:

jQuery port to PHP

This may be a good alternative if you are already familiar with jQuery's API.