PHP String Manipulation: Extract hrefs

Question

I have a string of HTML that I would like to check to see if there are any links inside of it and, if so, extract them and put them in an array. I can do this in jQuery with the simplicity of its selectors but I cannot find the right methods to use in PHP.

For example, the string may look like this:

<h1>Doctors</h1>
<a title="C - G" href="linkl.html">C - G</a>
<a title="G - K" href="link2.html">G - K</a>
<a title="K - M" href="link3.html">K - M</a>

How (in PHP) can i turn it into an array that looks something like:

[1]=>"link1.html"
[2]=>"link2.html"
[3]=>"link3.html"

Thanks, Ian

Answer 1

You can use PHPs DOMDocument library to parse XML and/or HTML. Something like the following should do the trick, to get the href attribute from a string of HTML.

$html = '<h1>Doctors</h1>
<a title="C - G" href="linkl.html">C - G</a>
<a title="G - K" href="link2.html">G - K</a>
<a title="K - M" href="link3.html">K - M</a>';

$hrefs = array();

$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadHTML($html);

$tags = $dom->getElementsByTagName('a');
foreach ($tags as $tag) {
       $hrefs[] =  $tag->getAttribute('href');
}

Answer 2

Your question is diffucult to understand but i believe you want a PHP DOM Parser, you can find simple dom parser here: http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net/ and a small usage example is:

$array = array();
foreach($html->find('a') as $a) 
{
    $array[] = $a->href;
}

you you can use jQuery then you should be able to use this no problem as its selecting system is the same as jQuery aswell as CSS, as jQuery derives from CSS

Answer 3

One line solution

$href = (string)( new SimpleXMLElement($your_html_tag))['href'];

Answer 4

if the format is always the same, u can probably sort it out with a combination of explode and strip_tags something like

 $html="<span class="field-content"><a href="http://url_to_extract">whatever</a></span>"


 $href=end(explode('"',strip_tags($html)));