Extract url from string via preg match in php

Question

$str = 'window.location.href="http://my-site.com";'

I want to extract the url from $str. I am not that good in preg_match(). However with the following code:

preg_match('/(http|https|ftp|ftps)\:\/\/[a-zA-Z0-9\-\.]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,3}(\/\S*)?/', $str, $link);
if (empty($link[0])) {
    echo "Nothing found!";
} else {
    echo $link[0];
}

I am able to get the result http://my-site.com";. I want to customize preg_match() to exclude "; from the result. Please help!

Answer 1

<?php
$str = 'window.location.href="http://my-site.com";';
preg_match('/window\.location\.href="(.*?)";/', $str, $result);
echo $result[1];
//http://my-site.com
>?

http://ideone.com/YTk70i

Answer 2

If you dont feel comfortable with preg_* then try keeping it simple. It seems a bit of an unnecessary overhead loading the regex engine anyway for something that simple.

Try this instead :-

$str = 'window.location.href="http://my-site.com";';

$p1 = strpos($str, 'href="') + strlen('href="');
$p2 = strpos($str, '";', $p1);

$url = substr($str,$p1,$p2-$p1);

echo $p1 .PHP_EOL;
echo $p2 .PHP_EOL;
echo $url;

This yeilds the following

22
40
http://my-site.com

i.e everything between href=" and ";

Answer 3

Try this:

preg_match('/^window.location.href="([^"]+)";$/', $str, $link);