Regular Expression to Search+Replace href=“URL”

Question

I\'m useless with regular expressions and haven\'t been able to google myself a clear solution to this one.

I want to search+replace some text ($content) for any url

Answer 1

Here is the gist of what I came up with. Hopefully it helps someone:

$content = get_the_content();
$pattern = "/(?<=href=(\"|'))[^\"']+(?=(\"|'))/";
$newurl = get_permalink();
$content = preg_replace($pattern,$newurl,$content);

echo $content;

Mucho thanko to @WiseGuyEh

Answer 2

This should do the trick- you can test it here

(?<=href=("|'))[^"']+(?=("|'))

It uses lookahead and lookbehind to assert that anything it matches starts with href=" or href=' and makes sure that it ends with a single or double quote.

Note: the regex will not be able to determine if this is a valid html document- if there is a mix of single then double quotes used to enclose a href value, it will ignore this error!