question about regular expression

[spazm_1999]

Hi guys,

I'm currently working on a regular expression and it's almost working... can't find the solution to my problem and i now start to beleve that there's no way to make it. Any what i basically need to do is a regular expression that would match all <a href> tags in a page and return the url contained in it. The problem is that it matchs things i don't want, and i stuck on finding a solution.

here's the php command i use.

preg_match("/[hH][rR][eE][fF]=\"?'?[^\s\"']*\"?'? ?/", $in[$i], $out);

This command works, but it matchs things like href="mailto: ..." and href="javascript: ... ". I could remove them by doing a strstr on 'em but i'd really prefer that the preg_match would'nt return 'em to me.

Does anyone know's if it's possible to do?

Spazm

[Wombat]

The colon should help you out. mailto<B>:</B>, java script<B>:</B>.

So, add in that the colon should have http<B>:</B>, or so.

[spazm_1999]

Hi,

I tryed it, but it doesn't do exactly what i what. The problem comes when the http: isn't present. Like href="/" or href=/index.html ... i'm really stuck with theses. I've started stripping them by with a substr, but if a solution is found to correct this i'll change the code.

Spazm

[spazm_1999]

I've just talked with my boss and it seem's your solution will do in the end. He changed his mind about parsing all the urls, now he only want those that start with http: ... anyway thanks Wombat.

Spazm

[Wombat]

You should still be able to write it so that <I>if</I> it has a colon then it must be http:, otherwise just take it.

I could do it easily in Perl, but don't know php's rules.

[spazm_1999]

Yeah, that's an idea... i'll have to test it later. Anyway since my boss decided to drop all the url that doesn't contain http: it simplify my job alot and it's been a good thing for me since it's my first try with regular expression. Everything's been fixed with this.

$content = preg_replace("/(<[Aa][^>]*[hH][rR][eE][fF]=.{0,1})([hH][tT]{2}[pP]:[^\s\"']*)([^>]*>[^>]*<\/[aA]>)/", "$1TEST$2$3", $content);

Good thing that php and perl has basically the same processing 'cuz i had to read a perl book to get enough info to build that thing.

Thanks a lot.

Spazm