Retrieve the text between A tags

Question

I'm trying to retrieve link text from an HTML file. Each of the link have a specific class applied to them, but the urls are different.

I have the following:

...
<a class="fetch-me" href="products/1">Find ME!!!</a>
...
<a class="fetch-me" href="products/2">Me too!</a>
...

I am using the following PHP code, but always getting more than I want:

preg_match_all('<a class="fetch-me" href=".*">(.*)</a>)siU', $string, $matching_data);

Answer 1

What about something like:

/<a[^>]*([^<]*)<\/a>/siU

Answer 2

If you must use a regex, use .*? instead of .*. *? is the non-greedy version of *; that is, rather than matching as much as possible, it matches as little as possible.

(By the way, don't try matching HTML or XML with regular expressions; that way lies madness. Instead, try using an HTML or XML parser. If you don't have an HTML parser, run it through HTML Tidy and use an XML parser. See meder's answer for how to do this in PHP.).

Answer 3

one way

$str= <<<A
blah blah
blah
...
<a class="fetch-me" href="products/1">Find ME!!!</a>
<a class="fetch-me" href="products/2">Me too!</a>
blah
blah
<a class="fetch-me"
          href="products/1">Find me, i am at next line!!!</a> blah blah
A;
$s = explode("</a>",$str);
foreach ($s as $k ){
    if (strpos($k,"href" ) !==FALSE ){
        print "--> ". preg_replace("/^.*href=\".*\">|\">.*/sm","",$k)."\n";
    }
}

output

$ php test.php
--> Find ME!!!
--> Me too!
--> Find me, i am at next line!!!

Ideally, you should use an actual parser, like everybody else said.

Answer 4

<?php

$str = '
<a class="fetch-me" href="products/1">Find ME!!!</a>
...
<a class="fetch-me" href="products/2">Me too!</a>
';

$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTML($str);
$xp = new DOMXpath($doc);
$query = $xp->evaluate('//a[@class="fetch-me"]');

if ( $query->length > 0 ) {
    foreach ($query as $anchor ) {
    echo $anchor->nodeValue . '<br>';
    }
}

You can also use @contains in combination with @class if multiple class values matter, you can always use an abstracted high level wrapper for DOM as well.

Answer 5

I've tried all of these answers and everyone's probably right. I am going to refactor to use HTML Tidy and a real parser.

Thanks for the suggestions.