Using regex to retrieve link between special characters in a string - php

Question

I want to retrieve the link between (Ampersand)lt; and (Ampersand)gt; from the below string.
<http://www.test.com>
I then want to replace the above string with the link. The string is in a file so I'm using the following code to replace the string in the file:
$contents = file_get_contents($path);
$contents = str_replace($id."\n", "", $contents);
if($count>0){
file_put_contents($filename,$contents);
}
However I cant figure out the regex I need to do this, can anyone help? I'm able to select the whole string using this but not the link I need.
"\&[l][t]\;(.*?)\&[g][t]\;"

Answer 1

You can do that without any regex using trim and htmlspecialchars_decode:
$s = '<http://www.test.com>';
$s = trim(htmlspecialchars_decode($s), "<>");
echo $s; // => http://www.test.com
See IDEONE demo
The htmlspecialchars_decode will convert the special HTML entities back to characters, and trim will remove < and > from the start and end of the string.

Answer 2

This was my solution below thanks to Wiktors advice. Hopefully it can help someone else out!
function removeUnwantedSignsFromContact($path){
$contents = file_get_contents($path);
if(preg_match( '/\&[l][t]\;(.*?)\&[g][t]\;/', $contents, $match )){
$filteredContact = trim(htmlspecialchars_decode($match[0]), "<>");
$contents = str_replace($match[0], $filteredContact, $contents);
file_put_contents($path,$contents);
return simplexml_load_file($path);
}
}