PHP : Transform links in custom tags with regular expression

Question

Hi,

I am trying to get a working regular expression to convert standard HTML code to a custom format (needed for data export).

For exemple within the following code :

<a href="toto.php">Toto
</a> bwahaha
<td width="49%" bgcolor="#FF9E39" style="padding-left: 10px; padding-top: 3px; padding-bottom: 3px; border-bottom: 5px solid rgb(255, 255, 255);" class="texteblanc">
<a href="nuit-orientation.php" class="texteblanc">[strong]Nuit de l'orientation[/strong]</a>
</td>

I would like to extract the two links in the following format :

[a:toto.php]Toto[/a]
[a:nuit-orientation.php][strong]Nuit de l'orientation[/strong][/a]

And of course I want the links to be kept in place within the existing HTML code.

So, I tryed the following code :

$txt = preg_replace('/<a href="(([[:word:]]|[[:punct:]])+)"[^>]*>\n*(\r\n)*\r*(([[:print:]]|\r\n|\n)+)\n*(\r\n)*\r*<\/a>/i', '[a:${1}]${4}[/a]', $txt);

It works but not all the time...

Does someone have any idea of how to do something like this ?

Thanks,

Damien

Answer 1

Don't use regex to parse HTML!

Use an HTML parser.