Extracting anchor text

is there a simple way to extract the anchor text of links using regualr expressions in php

like I am looking for basically this pattern

"target='_new'>Anti-War Protest In Texas</a>" from a bunch of text chunks

I want to extract the "Anti-War Protest In Texas" part

I could like split the string a fews times to get it, but is there a quicker way with regex

I was looking at php.net there is bunch of regex stuff that returns true or false but that not what I want

 

found this, not sure if this is exactly what you are looking for

preg_match("/<a.>(.)<\/a>/", $matchText, $temp);

PHP:

 

does (.) repesent any amount of charaters, I was trying (*)

 

yeah you could do (.*) to represent any number of characters

 

got it

">(.*)<\/a>"

PHP:

actually spoke too soon , gives me the url too

 

try |(<a[\s]+[^>]+>)([^</a>])(</a>)|i

The \s is important, otherwise it will match <abbr> and any other xhtml tag starting with a. Didn't test it, but it should be working.

 

is there a way to just get the link text?

or do I have to do some sort of replace?

 

preg_match("|(<a[\s]+[^>]+>)([^</a>])(</a>)|i", $link, $matches);

then $matches[1] will contain your anchor

 

It's not even going to match

<a href=\"test\">abc</a>

This expression will work on all one-line anchors

<a(?:[ \t]+[^>]*)?>([^<]+)<\/a>

J.D.

 

One char missing, sorry...

preg_match("|(<a[\s]+[^>]+>)([^</a>]+)(</a>)|i", "<a href=\"test\">foo</a>", $m);
print_r($m);

And the anchor is $m[2], not $m[1]

 

There's more than a char missing in this. Go ahead and give the anchor I quoted a try (the one with abc). You clearly don't understand what square brackets or parenthesis are for.

J.D.

 

bah-- I did, just replaced "abc" with "foo"!#!@#$

|(<a[\s]+[^>]+>)([^</a>]+)(</a>)|i is separator (match1) (match2) (match3) separator case_insensitive

- first parenthesis: match <a followed by any number of blanks (\s matches blanks and tabs), followed by any character but >
- second parentesis: match anything but </a> -- the anchor
- third parenthesis-- match </a>

Second parenthesis matches the anchor, which is $matches[2].

I believe I do understand how regex works...

 

No. Square brackets mean "any of the listed characters" or "none of the listed characters" if used with ^. So, this [^</a>]+ says "one or more of any character except <, /, a or >".

On top of that, why would you put parenthesis around everything? What's the point of capturing </a>?

J.D.

 

sheesh, got it now *blush*. Working for 15 straight hours must've gotten to me. Sorry!