regular expression to extract html links from a string

[ralph.m]

hello--I have spent hours now trying to figure this out. it should be simple but I have found it to not be.

I have a string and need to extract the links.

So

hello today is a fine day to post a <a href="http://www.linkme.com">link</a> to my favorite website.

should return

<a href="http://www.linkme.com">link</a>

I need to use preg_match_all() to find all occurances of html links in my string. preg_match_all() will put all the occurances into an array.

So far I have found about a dozen instances of this on the web but they must not have been written for php bc I keep getting errors like "Unknown modifier '['" and others.

my own attempt at the regular expression I would need is

PHP Code:

$preg="'\<a{1}'.*?'\<\/a\>'/i'";
preg_match_all($preg,$contents, $links); 


(1 occurance of "<a then zero or more occurances of any character (.), then "</a>". btw this probably sucks. as u can see i'm no good at regular expressions).

I would sincerely appreciate help bc I have just been working on this damn problem for so long.

[ralph.m]

i found this on one of the other threads...

PHP Code:

preg_match_all("/<a.*? href=\"(.*?)\".*?>(.*?)<\/a>/i",$string,$results); 


but it doesn't work bc when I use preg_replace with the same expression and replace links with '', there are still tons of links in the string...

[Fumigator]

That one you found will work for some anchor tags but not all. It doesn't find tags that use single quotes, for example. But it's a pretty good start.

This will include single quotes too:

PHP Code:

$preg = "/<a.*? href=(\"|')(.*?)(\"|').*?>(.*?)<\/a>/i"; 


If you want to post an example of an anchor tag that didn't get picked up by that regex then we can try to modify it further.

[urgido]

and for extract links only in the form /somedir/ or /somedir ??? Links like /someurl.php or http://www.lalala.com/index.php will be ignored

Regards