Grabbing the href attribute of an A element

Question

Trying to find the links on a page.

my regex is:

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

Answer 1

For the one who still not get the solutions very easy and fast using SimpleXML

$a = new SimpleXMLElement('<a href="www.something.com">Click here</a>');
echo $a['href']; // will echo www.something.com

Its working for me

Answer 2

Reliable Regex for HTML are difficult. Here is how to do it with DOM:

$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadHTML($html);
foreach ($dom->getElementsByTagName('a') as $node) {
    echo $dom->saveHtml($node), PHP_EOL;
}

The above would find and output the "outerHTML" of all A elements in the $html string.

To get all the text values of the node, you do

echo $node->nodeValue; 

To check if the href attribute exists you can do

echo $node->hasAttribute( 'href' );

To get the href attribute you'd do

echo $node->getAttribute( 'href' );

To change the href attribute you'd do

$node->setAttribute('href', 'something else');

To remove the href attribute you'd do

$node->removeAttribute('href'); 

You can also query for the href attribute directly with XPath

$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadHTML($html);
$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);
$nodes = $xpath->query('//a/@href');
foreach($nodes as $href) {
    echo $href->nodeValue;                       // echo current attribute value
    $href->nodeValue = 'new value';              // set new attribute value
    $href->parentNode->removeAttribute('href');  // remove attribute
}

Also see:

• Best methods to parse HTML
• DOMDocument in php

On a sidenote: I am sure this is a duplicate and you can find the answer somewhere in here

Answer 3

The following is working for me and returns both href and value of the anchor tag.

preg_match_all("'\<a.*?href=\"(.*?)\".*?\>(.*?)\<\/a\>'si", $html, $match);
if($match) {
    foreach($match[0] as $k => $e) {
        $urls[] = array(
            'anchor'    =>  $e,
            'href'      =>  $match[1][$k],
            'value'     =>  $match[2][$k]
        );
    }
}

The multidimensional array called $urls contains now associative sub-arrays that are easy to use.

Answer 4

preg_match_all("/(]>)(.?)(</a)/", $contents, $impmatches, PREG_SET_ORDER);

It is tested and it fetch all a tag from any html code.