Regex & PHP - isolate src attribute from img tag

Question

With PHP, how can I isolate the contents of the src attribute from $foo? The end result I\'m looking for would give me just \"http://example.com/img/image.jpg\"

Answer 1

I'm extremely late to this, but I have a simple solution not yet mentioned. Load it with simplexml_load_string (if you have simplexml enabled) and then flip it through json_encode and json_decode.

$foo = '';

$parsedFoo = json_decode(json_encode(simplexml_load_string($foo)), true);
var_dump($parsedFoo['@attributes']['src']); // output: "http://example.com/img/image.jpg"

$parsedFoo comes through as

array(1) {
  ["@attributes"]=>
  array(6) {
    ["class"]=>
    string(12) "foo bar test"
    ["title"]=>
    string(10) "test image"
    ["src"]=>
    string(32) "http://example.com/img/image.jpg"
    ["alt"]=>
    string(10) "test image"
    ["width"]=>
    string(3) "100"
    ["height"]=>
    string(3) "100"
  }
}

I've been using this for parsing XML and HTML for a few months now and it works pretty well. I've had no hiccups yet, though I haven't had to parse a large file with it (I imagine using json_encode and json_decode like that will get slower the larger the input gets). It's convoluted, but it's by far the easiest way to read HTML properties.