Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Programming Discussion : preg_replace for url please?

[lexington]

Hello, after all of these years of trying I still cannot learn complex preg_replace expressions. Please do not bother pointing me to a tutorial since it may be just something my brain refuses to learn. I would like to have it detect urls and to add a <span class="blah">text</span> within the url. So when it detects:

<a href="url">text</a>

it replaces it with:

<a href="url"><span class="blah">text</span></a>

Could you please provide me with a working example?

[Steve_Arm]

PHP Code:

$str = '<a class="b" href="http://www.test.com">This is a test</a>';
echo preg_replace('/(<a\b[^>]*>)(.*?)(<\/a>)/i', '$1<span class="blah">$2</span>$3', $str); 


Why not though, add a class to the a tag and not add the span tag?

[lexington]

Thanks but it doesn't seem to replace the a href code. There are no errors, it is as though I never made any changes. I noticed you added a "class="b" within the href code, perhaps that is the reason it doesn't work?

[lexington]

Anyone please?

[hhw]

PHP Code:

$str = '<a href="url">text</a>';
$str = preg_replace('/<a href=[\'\"]((?:http:\/\/)?[a-zA-Z0-9:\._-]+)[\'\"]>(.*?)<\/a>/', "<a href=\"$1\"><span class=\"blah\">$2</span></a>", $str);
print "$str\n"; 


[lexington]

Sorry that doesn't work either. You guys know that it is a huge paragraph with text and images, and it has to locate the hyperlink from all of the text and add the span tags to it?

[lexington]

Actually nevermind, I actually found a pregmatch that the script used already in another included file and added my new span class there and it did the job. Thanks for taking the time to help me

[mattle]

Why are you using preg_match/replace? This is definitely a job for DOMDocument...

[lexington]

oops nevermind