regular expressions - match all anchors with optional attributes

Question

I have a wysiwyg editor in my back end, and it is tripping up the first regular expression I wrote. This is in PHP4, using preg_replace(). I\'m capturing the UR

Answer 1

this should match it alright:

/]*)href="https?:\/\/([^"]*)"(.*?)>(.*?)<\/a>/

The useful thing here is the lazy match. *? it means that it'll match only as much as it absolutely needs to, as opposed to the regular match, which is greedy.

To demonstrate, with this text:

a b c d a b c d

these regexes will have different results:

/a.*c/    selects: "a b c d a b c"
/a.*?c/   selects: "a b c"