Anchor tags to plain text within content
-
10-07-2019 - |
Question
I am trying to match <a>
tags within my content and replace then with the link text followed by the url in square brackets for a print-version. The following example works if there is only the "href". If the <a>
contains another attribute, it matches too much and doesn't return the desired result. How can I match the URL and the link text and that's it?
Here is my code:
<?php
$content = '<a href="http://www.website.com">This is a text link</a>';
$result = preg_replace('/<a href="(http:\/\/[A-Za-z0-9\\.:\/]{1,})">([\\s\\S]*?)<\/a>/',
'<strong>\\2</strong> [\\1]', $content);
echo $result;
?>
Desired result:
<strong>This is a text link </strong> [http://www.website.com]
Thanks, Jason
Solution
You can make the match ungreedy using ?
.
You should also take into account there may be attributes before the href
attribute.
$result = preg_replace('/<a [^>]*?href="(http:\/\/[A-Za-z0-9\\.:\/]+?)">([\\s\\S]*?)<\/a>/',
'<strong>\\2</strong> [\\1]', $content);
OTHER TIPS
You should be using DOM to parse HTML, not regular expressions...
Edit: Updated code to do simple regex parsing on the href attribute value.
Edit #2: Made the loop regressive so it can handle multiple replacements.
$content = '
<p><a href="http://www.website.com">This is a text link</a></p>
<a href="http://sitename.com/#foo">bah</a>
<a href="#foo">I wont change</a>
';
$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadHTML($content);
$anchors = $dom->getElementsByTagName('a');
$len = $anchors->length;
if ( $len > 0 ) {
$i = $len-1;
while ( $i > -1 ) {
$anchor = $anchors->item( $i );
if ( $anchor->hasAttribute('href') ) {
$href = $anchor->getAttribute('href');
$regex = '/^http/';
if ( !preg_match ( $regex, $href ) ) {
$i--;
continue;
}
$text = $anchor->nodeValue;
$textNode = $dom->createTextNode( $text );
$strong = $dom->createElement('strong');
$strong->appendChild( $textNode );
$anchor->parentNode->replaceChild( $strong, $anchor );
}
$i--;
}
}
echo $dom->saveHTML();
?>