preg_match expression help

Question

Can't seem to figure this one out. Just trying to preg match for a specific variable name in a link URL:

<a href="http://something.com?variable=name"&gt;GenericLink&lt;/a&gt;

How do I get the variable=name out of this?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Extract the whole url and then use parse_url();

$str = '<a href="http://something.com?variable=name"&gt;GenericLink&lt;/a&gt;';

preg_match('/href="([^"]*)/i',$str,$matches);
var_dump(parse_url($matches[1]));