php regex to get string inside href tag

Question

I need a regex that will give me the string inside an href tag and inside the quotes also.

For example i need to extract theurltoget.com in the following:

Answer 1

This will handle the case where there are no quotes around the URL.

/<a [^>]*href="?([^">]+)"?>/

But seriously, do not parse HTML with regex. Use DOM or a proper parsing library.

Answer 2

Dont use regex for this. You can use xpath and built in php functions to get what you want:

    $xml = simplexml_load_string($myHtml);
    $list = $xml->xpath("//@href");

    $preparedUrls = array();
    foreach($list as $item) {
        $item = parse_url($item);
        $preparedUrls[] = $item['scheme'] . '://' .  $item['host'] . '/';
    }
    print_r($preparedUrls);

Answer 3

this expression will handle 3 options:

1. no quotes
2. double quotes
3. single quotes

'/href=["\']?([^"\'>]+)["\']?/'