How to validate plain text (link text) in a hyperlink using php? - php

Question

I am using simple html dom to fetch datas from other websites. while fetching data it fetches both hyperlinks with plain text and without plain text. I want to remove hyperlinks without plain text(link text) while fetching the data ..
i have tried below codes
if($title==""){ echo "No text";}
and
if(ctype_space($title)) { echo "No text";}
where $title is the plaintext fetched from the website
but both method didnt worked..can any one help
Advance thanks for your help

Answer 1

Until you give us more information on what value is my best guess would be to try something like this
if(empty($title))
{
echo "No Text";
}

Answer 2

Does it really need to be "plain text validation"?
Reading your question it seems you just want to remove links with empty values.
If the latter is true, you can do something like this:
$html = <<<EOL
Text
More Text
EOL;
$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadHTML($html);
$links = $dom->getElementsByTagName('a');
foreach ($links as $link) {
if (strlen(trim($link->nodeValue)) == 0) {
$link->parentNode->removeChild($link);
}
}
var_dump($dom->saveHTML());

Answer 3

$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadHTML($html);
$xPath = new DOMXPath($html);
$links_array = $xPath->query("//a"); // select all a tags
$totalLinks = $links_array->length; // how many links there are.
for($i = 0; $i < $totalLinks; $i++) // process each link one by one
{
$title = $links_array->item($i)->nodeValue; // get LInkText
if($title == '') // if no link text
{
$url = $links_array->item($i)->getAttribute('href');
// do here what you want
}
}

Answer 4

You need to use preg_match, with a regular expression, to extract the link text. For example
if (preg_match("/<a.*?>(.*?)</",$title,$matches))
{
echo $matches[1];
}