Assume I have a valid htmlfile which I save into a string. Now I want to extract the links of the anchor elements (hrefs). Therefore I want to use pure regular expressions.
preg_match_all('/<a [^>]*href="(.+)">/', $html, $match);
Usually I want to receive a string like that:
http://www.thisIsAHrefLinkIWantToHave.de
But instead I receive also the following string, logical caused by (.+) in the regex:
index?a=f">Link</a> Link 2 Link 3 Link 4 Link 5 Link 6 <a href="http://mysite.org
I found solutions like Xpath or DOMDocument (
PHP String Manipulation: Extract hrefs) But I'd like to have solution without those/any libraries, just with regex. What I have to do to solve the matter of my regex?
I thought about from first " to next " . But how to create that pattern or another pattern, which solves the problem?
[EDIT:] Solution
preg_match_all('/<a [^>]*href="([A-Za-z0-9\/?=:&_.]+)?"/', $html, $match);
Try preg_match_all('/<a [^>]*href="(.+)?">/', $html, $match);, the ? makes .* non-greedy.
Musa is correct in that the period (.) is greedy. try [A-Za-z0-9_]+ instead of .+
Related
I'm a regex-noobie, so sorry for this "simple" question:
I've got an URL like following:
http://stellenanzeige.monster.de/COST-ENGINEER-AUTOMOTIVE-m-w-Job-Mainz-Rheinland-Pfalz-Deutschland-146370543.aspx
what I'm going to archieve is getting the number-sequence (aka Job-ID) right before the ".aspx" with preg_replace.
I've already figured out that the regex for finding it could be
(?!.*-).*(?=\.)
Now preg_replace needs the opposite of that regular expression. How can I archieve that? Also worth mentioning:
The URL can have multiple numbers in it. I only need the sequence right before ".aspx". Also, there could be some php attributes behind the ".aspx" like "&mobile=true"
Thank you for your answers!
You can use:
$re = '/[^-.]+(?=\.aspx)/i';
preg_match($re, $input, $matches);
//=> 146370543
This will match text not a hyphen and not a dot and that is followed by .aspx using a lookahead (?=\.aspx).
RegEx Demo
You can just use preg_match (you don't need preg_replace, as you don't want to change the original string) and capture the number before the .aspx, which is always at the end, so the simplest way, I could think of is:
<?php
$string = "http://stellenanzeige.monster.de/COST-ENGINEER-AUTOMOTIVE-m-w-Job-Mainz-Rheinland-Pfalz-Deutschland-146370543.aspx";
$regex = '/([0-9]+)\.aspx$/';
preg_match($regex, $string, $results);
print $results[1];
?>
A short explanation:
$result contains an array of results; as the whole string, that is searched for is the complete regex, the first element contains this match, so it would be 146370543.aspx in this example. The second element contains the group captured by using the parentheeses around [0-9]+.
You can get the opposite by using this regex:
(\D*)\d+(.*)
Working demo
MATCH 1
1. [0-100] `http://stellenanzeige.monster.de/COST-ENGINEER-AUTOMOTIVE-m-w-Job-Mainz-Rheinland-Pfalz-Deutschland-`
2. [109-114] `.aspx`
Even if you just want the number for that url you can use this regex:
(\d+)
I am trying to get the 6 or 7 number sequence and put it in the urls array.
<a href="/product/view/4539922/" class="raw_clafd">
However I am having a problem with the regex below.
preg_match_all('/<a\s+href="\.\/view\/(\d{6,7})\/" class="raw_clafd">/', $str, $urls);
What am I missing? Thank you
You cannot match /product with \.
You can use:
preg_match_all('#<a\s+href="/product/view/(\d{6,7})/"\s+class="raw_clafd">#', $str, $urls);
But I really believe you should consider using DOM parser.
You can get the value after /view/ just by using
/\/view\/(\d{6,7})/
I have a regex that's matching urls and converting them into html links.
If the url is already part of a link I don't want to to match, for example:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/ask
Should match, but:
Stackoverflow
Shouldn't match
How can I create a regex to do this?
If your url matching regular expression is $URL then you can use the following pattern
(?<!href[\"'])$URL
In PHP you'd write
preg_match("/(?<!href[\"'])$URL/", $text, $matches);
You can use a negative lookbehind to assert that the url is not preceded by href="
(?<!href=")
(Your url-matching pattern should go immediately after that.)
This link provides information. The accepted solution is like so:
<a\s
(?:(?!href=|target=|>).)*
href="http://
(?:(?!target=|>).)*
By removing the references to "target" this should work for you.
Try this
/(?:(([^">']+|^)https?\:\/\/[^\s]+))/m
I am trying to pull the anchor text from a link that is formatted this way:
<h3><b>File</b> : i_want_this</h3>
I want only the anchor text for the link : "i_want_this"
"variable_text" varies according to the filename so I need to ignore that.
I am using this regex:
<a href=\"\/en\/browse\/file\/variable_text\">(.*?)<\/a>
This is matching of course the complete link.
PHP uses a pretty close version to PCRE (PERL Regex). If you want to know a lot about regex, visit perlretut.org. Also, look into Regex generators like exspresso.
For your use, know that regex is greedy. That means that when you specify that you want something, follwed by anything (any repetitions) followed by something, it will keep on going until that second something is reached.
to be more clear, what you want is this:
<a href="
any character, any number of times (regex = .* )
">
any character, any number of times (regex = .* )
</a>
beyond that, you want to capture the second group of "any character, any number of times". You can do that using what are called capture groups (capture anything inside of parenthesis as a group for reference later, also called back references).
I would also look into named subpatterns, too - with those, you can reference your choice with a human readable string rather than an array index. Syntax for those in PHP are (?P<name>pattern) where name is the name you want and pattern is the actual regex. I'll use that below.
So all that being said, here's the "lazy web" for your regex:
<?php
$str = '<h3><b>File</b> : i_want_this</h3>';
$regex = '/(<a href\=".*">)(?P<target>.*)(<\/a>)/';
preg_match($regex, $str, $matches);
print $matches['target'];
?>
//This should output "i_want_this"
Oh, and one final thought. Depending on what you are doing exactly, you may want to look into SimpleXML instead of using regex for this. This would probably require that the tags that we see are just snippits of a larger whole as SimpleXML requires well-formed XML (or XHTML).
I'm sure someone will probably have a more elegant solution, but I think this will do what you want to done.
Where:
$subject = "<h3><b>File</b> : i_want_this</h3>";
Option 1:
$pattern1 = '/(<a href=")(.*)(">)(.*)(<\/a>)/i';
preg_match($pattern1, $subject, $matches1);
print($matches1[4]);
Option 2:
$pattern2 = '()(.*)()';
ereg($pattern2, $subject, $matches2);
print($matches2[4]);
Do not use regex to parse HTML. Use a DOM parser. Specify the language you're using, too.
Since it's in a captured group and since you claim it's matching, you should be able to reference it through $1 or \1 depending on the language.
$blah = preg_match( $pattern, $subject, $matches );
print_r($matches);
The thing to remember is that regex's return everything you searched for if it matches. You need to specify that only care about the part you've surrounded in parenthesis (the anchor text). I'm not sure what language you're using the regex in, but here's an example in Ruby:
string = 'i_want_this'
data = string.match(/<a href=\"\/en\/browse\/file\/variable_text\">(.*?)<\/a>/)
puts data # => outputs 'i_want_this'
If you specify what you want in parenthesis, you can reference it:
string = 'i_want_this'
data = string.match(/<a href=\"\/en\/browse\/file\/variable_text\">(.*?)<\/a>/)[1]
puts data # => outputs 'i_want_this'
Perl will have you use $1 instead of [1] like this:
$string = 'i_want_this';
$string =~ m/<a href=\"\/en\/browse\/file\/variable_text\">(.*?)<\/a>/;
$data = $1;
print $data . "\n";
Hope that helps.
I'm not 100% sure if I understand what you want. This will match the content between the anchor tags. The URL must start with /en/browse/file/, but may end with anything.
#(.*?)#
I used # as a delimiter as it made it clearer. It'll also help if you put them in single quotes instead of double quotes so you don't have to escape anything at all.
If you want to limit to numbers instead, you can use:
#(.*?)#
If it should have just 5 numbers:
#(.*?)#
If it should have between 3 and 6 numbers:
#(.*?)#
If it should have more than 2 numbers:
#(.*?)#
This should work:
<a href="[^"]*">([^<]*)
this says that take EVERYTHING you find until you meet "
[^"]*
same! take everything with you till you meet <
[^<]*
The paratese around [^<]*
([^<]*)
group it! so you can collect that data in PHP! If you look in the PHP manual om preg_match you will se many fine examples there!
Good luck!
And for your concrete example:
<a href="/en/browse/file/variable_text">([^<]*)
I use
[^<]*
because in some examples...
.*?
can be extremely slow! Shoudln't use that if you can use
[^<]*
You should use the tool Expresso for creating regular expression... Pretty handy..
http://www.ultrapico.com/Expresso.htm
Since I am completely useless at regex and this has been bugging me for the past half an hour, I think I'll post this up here as it's probably quite simple.
hey.exe
hey2.dll
pomp.jpg
In PHP I need to extract what's between the <a> tags example:
hey.exe
hey2.dll
pomp.jpg
Avoid using '.*' even if you make it ungreedy, until you have some more practice with RegEx. I think a good solution for you would be:
'/<a[^>]+>([^<]+)<\/a>/i'
Note the '/' delimiters - you must use the preg suite of regex functions in PHP. It would look like this:
preg_match_all($pattern, $string, $matches);
// matches get stored in '$matches' variable as an array
// matches in between the <a></a> tags will be in $matches[1]
print_r($matches);
This appears to work:
$pattern = '/<a.*?>(.*?)<\/a>/';
([^<]*)
I found this regular expression tester to be helpful.
Here is a very simple one:
<a.*>(.*)</a>
However, you should be careful if you have several matches in the same line, e.g.
hey.exehey2.dll
In this case, the correct regex would be:
<a.*?>(.*?)</a>
Note the '?' after the '*' quantifier. By default, quantifiers are greedy, which means they eat as much characters as they can (meaning they would return only "hey2.dll" in this example). By appending a quotation mark, you make them ungreedy, which should better fit your needs.