Regexp for extracting all links and anchor texts from HTML

Question

I'd like one or more regexes that can:

1) Take the html of a large page.

2) Find the urls contained in all links, for example:

<a href="http://example1.com">Test 1</a>
<a class="foo" id="bar" href="http://example2.com">Test 2</a>
<a onclick="foo();" id="bar" href="http://example3.com">Test 3</a>

And so on, it should extract the url contained in the 'href'attribute regardless of what comes before or after the href

3) Extract the anchor text of all links, for example in the above examples, it should return 'http://example1.com' and the anchor text 'Test 1', then 'http://example2.com' and 'Test 2', and so on.

Answer 1

<?

$dom = new DomDocument();
$dom->loadHTML($html);
$urls = $dom->getElementsByTagName('a');

Answer 2

You need to take a look at look ahead and look behind.

<?php

$string = '<a href="http://example1.com">Test 1</a>
<a class="foo" id="bar" href="http://example2.com">Test 2</a>
<a onclick="foo();" id="bar" href="http://example3.com">Test 3</a>';

if(preg_match_all("|<a.*(?=href=\"([^\"]*)\")[^>]*>([^<]*)</a>|i", $string, $matches))
        {
        /*** if we find the word white, not followed by house ***/
        echo 'Found a match';
        print_r($matches);
    }
else
        {
        /*** if no match is found ***/
        echo 'No match found';
        }
?>