Parsing a link from text body

[pdbowling]

Hello, All.

If I have a text block string from the body of an email and I want to parse links out of the text, how would I go about that?

I could search for href=" and take everything up to the next quote but how do I designate the area between the quotes as the text to pull into a new string?

Being a c# developer I tend to think in terms of positions withing the string.

newString = bodyString.subString(firstQuotePosition, secondQuotePosition)

but I am so unfamiliar with php that I don't know the syntax for something lik 'indexof(searchString)'.

Suggestions?

Thanks
PB

Gather or post content for free.

http://www.ufo-articles.com

 

[jet042]

http://us.php.net/manual/en/function.stripos.php

This would work like indexof(). Just call it twice and set the offset to the first value returned plus 1. For example:

$intFirst = stripos($string, "href=\"");
$intSecond = stripos($string, "\"", $intFirst+1);

$length = $intSecond - intFirst;
$start = $intFirst + 6;
$link = substr($string, $start, $length);

 

[jet042]

That being said, you can also do this with regular expressions and it will probably work better. However, I do not know them as well as others on this board and hesitate to try and tell anyone how to use them.

Also, I didn't test that code before posting it, so there may be some errors in it.

 

[jpadie]

something like this should work

function getLink($text){
 $pattern = '/href=("|\')(.*?)$1/i';
 $matches = preg_match_all($pattern, $text, $matches);
 return $matches;
}

 

[jet042]

Here's a tested version, but jpadie's regex should still work better.

<?php

$fp = fopen("test.txt", 'rb');

if ($fp) {
  while (!feof($fp)) {
    $intFirst = $intSecond = $offset = 0;
    $string = fgets($fp);
  
    $intFirst = stripos($string, 'href="');
    if ($intFirst !== false) {
      $offset = $intFirst + 6;
      $intSecond = stripos($string, '"', $offset);
     
      $length = $intSecond - $offset;
      $start = $intFirst + 6;
      $link = substr($string, $start, $length);
      
      echo $link . "\n\n";
    }
  }
}
?>

test.txt was some HTML source from an internal page.