Parsing content for links

Tony wrote:
> I have a content management system that has links within the content
> field in the database and I need to verify if those links are correct.
> What I need to have happen is have a php script query the database and
> then parse through the content field to find all the <a href> tags to
> get the href attribute value and the link text.
>
> Does anyone have a way of doing this or a regex to do this?
>
> Thanks,
> Tony
>

Yeah, regex would be easiest, and there should be plenty out there,
but I might do something like this:

$re = '%
<a[^<>]+ # href may or may not come first
href=([\'"]) # capture single/double quote

# match a valid URI
(
[\w.-]+?://)? # scheme
[^?"]+ # authority

# possible query string and fragment
(?:
\\? [^#]+
(?: \\# [^"]+ )?
)?
)

\1 # captured quote from above
[^<>]* # possible remaining attributes
>( .*? ) # allow for nested tags
</a> # closing <a> tag
%xi';

The match for the URI would be in $match[2] and the text for the <a>
tag is in $match[3].

Just use this $re var in the preg_* functions.

Hope this helps,
Curtis
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