Using regular expressions to extract the first image source from html codes?

Question

I would like to know how this can be achieved.

Assume: That there\'s a lot of html code containing tables, divs, images, etc.

Problem: How can I get matches

Answer 1

I don't know if you MUST use regex to get your results. If not, you could try out simpleXML and XPath, which would be much more reliable for your goal:

First, import the HTML into a DOM Document Object. If you get errors, turn errors off for this part and be sure to turn them back on afterward:

 $dom = new DOMDocument();
 $dom -> loadHTMLFile("filename.html");

Next, import the DOM into a simpleXML object, like so:

 $xml = simplexml_import_dom($dom);

Now you can use a few methods to get all of your image elements (and their attributes) into an array. XPath is the one I prefer, because I've had better luck with traversing the DOM with it:

 $images = $xml -> xpath('//img/@src');

This variable now can treated like an array of your image URLs:

 foreach($images as $image) {
    echo '

    ';
  }

Presto, all of your images, none of the fat.

Here's the non-annotated version of the above:

---

 $dom = new DOMDocument();
 $dom -> loadHTMLFile("filename.html");

 $xml = simplexml_import_dom($dom);

 $images = $xml -> xpath('//img/@src');

 foreach($images as $image) {
    echo '

    ';
  }