PHP - split a string of HTML attributes into an indexed array

Question

I\'ve got a string with HTML attributes:

$attribs = \' id= \"header \" class = \"foo   bar\" style =\"background-color:#fff; color: red; \"\';

Answer 1

You can't use a regular expression to parse html-attributes. This is because the syntax is contextual. You can use regular expressions to tokenize the input, but you need a state machine to parse it.

If the performance isn't a big deal, the safest way to do it, is probably to wrap the attributes in a tag and then send it through an html parser. Eg.:

function parse_attributes($input) {
  $dom = new DomDocument();
  $dom->loadHtml("");
  $attributes = array();
  foreach ($dom->documentElement->attributes as $name => $attr) {
    $attributes[$name] = $node->value;
  }
  return $attributes;
}

You could probably optimize the above, by reusing the parser, or by using XmlReader or the sax parser.