How To Parse String For All URL's?

Hey guys,

Let's say I have a string with a butt load of HTML in it. What would be the most efficient way to parse through and find all the URL's in it?

I currently have a function that will pull all text from between let's say, <a> and </a>, but after it does it once, it stops (what it searches between can literally be anything). Obviously I need a loop of some sort... but I'm kinda brain dead today and not seeing a good way to pull this off.

Thanks.

 

I needed something similar to this for one of my projects. I just created an infinite loop and set a condition which when met breaks the loop.

while(1){

// Code which pulls text between<a> and </a>

if($offset === false) {
break;
}

}

PHP:

Remember to store the offset, so that the loop doesn't loop over the same set of <a></a> over and over.
i.e.

$offset = strpos($text, "</a>", $offset);

PHP:

Hope this makes sense, I'm quite tired...

 

Hey, check out the PHP command preg_match_all.

You can use it to easily find all matches (with a clever regular expression), like:

$strHTML = "<a href=\"asdf\">etc etc</a>"; // This would be your html code you need parsed.
preg_match_all('/<a href="(.+?)">(.+?)<\/a>/', $strHTML, $matches, PREG_SET_ORDER);
print_r($matches);

PHP:

( Untested of course but I hope it helps =] )

 

Thanks guys.

I looked pretty heavily into preg_match_all but regular expressions were killing me. I went through the whole chapter about it in one of my books... it helped a little but there are a lot of nuances I guess I will have to learn over time.

I'll try the preg_match_all method first, and then the latter.

Thanks!

 

Ok I stripped this from a piece of code I wrote for an affiliate script. It will return the number of urls as well as print each out one.

<?
$file = file_get_contents('http://www.yourfile');
preg_match_all('/<a href="(.*)">/', $file, $a);
$count = count($a[1]);
echo "<b>Number of Urls</b> = " .$count."<p>";
for ($row = 0; $row < $count ; $row++) {
echo $a[1]["$row"]."<br>";
}
?>

PHP:

 

This is almost exactly what I needed! Thanks! With just a couple teensy modifications, I should have this all ready to go in no time.

Thanks!!! +rep!