Voting

The Note You're Voting On

14 years ago
Created this to fetch the link and name of an anchor tag. I use this when cleaning an HTML email to text. Using regex for HTML is not recommended but for this purpose I see no issue with it. This is not designed to work for nested anchors.

A note to keep in mind:
I was primarily concerned with valid HTML so if attributes do no use ' or " to contain the values then this will need to be tweaked.
If you can edit this to work better, please let me know.
<?php
/**
 * Replaces anchor tags with text
 * - Will search string and replace all anchor tags with text (case insensitive)
 * 
 * How it works:
 * - Searches string for an anchor tag, checks to make sure it matches the criteria
 *         Anchor search criteria:
 *             - 1 - <a (must have the start of the anchor tag )
 *             - 2 - Can have any number of spaces or other attributes before and after the href attribute
 *             - 3 - Must close the anchor tag
 * 
 * - Once the check has passed it will then replace the anchor tag with the string replacement
 * - The string replacement can be customized
 * 
 * Know issue:
 * - This will not work for anchors that do not use a ' or " to contain the attributes. 
 *         (i.e.- <a href=http: //php.net>PHP.net</a> will not be replaced)
 */
function replaceAnchorsWithText($data) {
    /**
     * Had to modify $regex so it could post to the site... so I broke it into 6 parts.
     */
    $regex  = '/(<a\s*'; // Start of anchor tag
    $regex .= '(.*?)\s*'; // Any attributes or spaces that may or may not exist
    $regex .= 'href=[\'"]+?\s*(?P<link>\S+)\s*[\'"]+?'; // Grab the link
    $regex .= '\s*(.*?)\s*>\s*'; // Any attributes or spaces that may or may not exist before closing tag 
    $regex .= '(?P<name>\S+)'; // Grab the name
    $regex .= '\s*<\/a>)/i'; // Any number of spaces between the closing anchor tag (case insensitive)
    
    if (is_array($data)) {
        // This is what will replace the link (modify to you liking)
        $data = "{$data['name']}({$data['link']})";
    }
    return preg_replace_callback($regex, 'replaceAnchorsWithText', $data);
}

$input  = 'Test 1: <a href="http: //php.net1">PHP.NET1</a>.<br />';
$input .= 'Test 2: <A name="test" HREF=\'HTTP: //PHP.NET2\' target="_blank">PHP.NET2</A>.<BR />';
$input .= 'Test 3: <a hRef=http: //php.net3>php.net3</a><br />';
$input .= 'This last line had nothing to do with any of this';

echo replaceAnchorsWithText($input).'<hr/>';
?>
Will output:
Test 1: PHP.NET1(http: //php.net1).
Test 2: PHP.NET2(HTTP: //PHP.NET2).
Test 3: php.net3 (is still an anchor)
This last line had nothing to do with any of this
<< Back to user notes page