little help with preg_match please

Hi,
I'm trying to extract the URL from an anchor tag using preg_match_all, but it seems to be completely neglecting the matching part after the URL.
Here's the preg_match:

preg_match_all( '/(href)(\s)*(=)(\"|\'|\s)*(.*?)(\"|\'|\s)*(>)/is', '<a href="http://localhost/?w=title_quote" title=some > localhost2 </a>', $s );
preg_match_all( '/(href)(\s)*(=)(\"|\'|\s)*(.*?)(\"|\'|\s)*(>)/is', '<a href="index.php?w=title_quote" title=some > localhost2 </a>', $s );

Code (markup):

They both give:
the URL along with:
" title= etc.
I just want the URL...

Could someone please rectify the mistake?
Thanks

 

A few heads up. Anything in parenthesis () you're actually retrieving the subsequent match of - you have parenthesis all over the place, which is why $s is returning so many results. Another one; you're properly escaping double quotation marks ", so congrats, but not single quotation marks The string itself is encased with single quotations, so \' is essentially just ' in your pattern. You need it as \', so \\\' should work. Finally, your pattern needs to be optimiesd. The following should work:

preg_match_all( '/href\s*=[\"|\\\'|\s]{1}(.*?)[\"|\\\'|\s]{1}[^>]{0,}>/is', '<a href="http://localhost/?w=title_quote" title=some > localhost2 </a>', $s );

PHP:

 

I generally use this for such purposes.

http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net

Good luck.

 

Yes, generally it's a much better idea to access such things through DOM, for example using Zend_Dom_Query:

http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/zend.dom.query.html

A pattern for capturing the href attribute would be something like this: /href="([^"]+)"/

 

Try the following code

$str = '<a href="http://localhost/?w=title_quote" title=some > localhost2 </a>';
$pattern = '#href="([^"]+)"#si';
if (preg_match_all($pattern, $str, $m))
{
        $matches = $m[1];
        print_r($matches);
}

Code (markup):

 

you solved other wise contact me