regexp for finding everything between <a> and </a> tags

Question

Hi,

I'm trying to find a way to make a list of everything between <a> and </a> tags. So I have a list of links and I want to get the names of the links (not where the links go, but what they're called on the page). Would be really helpful to me.

Currently I have this:

$lines = preg_split("/\r?\n|\r/", $content);  // content is the given page
foreach ($lines as $val) {
  if (preg_match("/(<A(.*)>)(<\/A>)/", $val, $alink)) {     
    $newurl = $alink[1];

    // put in array of found links
    $links[$index] = $newurl;
    $index++;
    $is_href = true;
  }
}

Answer 1

Regex, the black magic, again :)

I found one nice question about common regex. There some interesting links where you will find very common regexpressions like yours.

Grabbing HTML Tags

< TAG\b[^>]>(.?) Analyze this regular expression with RegexBuddy matches the opening and closing pair of a specific HTML tag. Anything between the tags is captured into the first backreference. The question mark in the regex makes the star lazy, to make sure it stops before the first closing tag rather than before the last, like a greedy star would do. This regex will not properly match tags nested inside themselves, like in onetwoone.

<([A-Z][A-Z0-9])\b[^>]>(.*?) Analyze this regular expression with RegexBuddy will match the opening and closing pair of any HTML tag. Be sure to turn off case sensitivity. The key in this solution is the use of the backreference \1 in the regex. Anything between the tags is captured into the second backreference. This solution will also not match tags nested in themselves.

Otherwise: Browse this link: keyword "link". There are some interesting approaches to filter links.

I hope this helps :)

Good luck!

Answer 2

The standard disclaimer applies: Parsing HTML with regular expressions is not ideal. Success depends on the well-formedness of the input on a character-by-character level. If you cannot guarantee this, the regex will fail to do the Right Thing at some point.

Having said that:

<a\b[^>]*>(.*?)</a>   // match group one will contain the link text

Answer 3

Well.. Using regular expressions is not perfect, but in perl regexp,

m!<a .*?>(.*?)</a>!i

should give you the name of the first link on that line in match group one, ignoring case.

Limitations:

• Does not handle multiple links on one line
• Does not handle links going over several lines.
• Will also match on anchor tags.

You could work around this by joining all lines into one line and then split it into an array (or multiple lines) using the link start as separator.

Answer 4

<a\s*(.*)\>(.*)</a>

<a href="http://www.stackoverflow.com"&gt;Go to stackoverflow.com</a>

$1 = href="www.stackoverflow.com"

$2 = Go to stackoverflow.com

I answered a similar question to strip everything except a tags here

Answer 5

Hey guys, i've fund a very useful tool to generate regular expressions, you should take a look!!

Expresso

Greetz, ZappeL

Answer 6

I'm a big fan of regexes, but this is not the right place to use them.

Use a real HTML parser.

• Your code will be clearer
• It will be more likely to work

I Googled for a PHP HTML parser, and found this one.

If you know you're working with XHTML, then you could use PHP's standard XML parser.