I'm a newbie here. I'm facing a weird problem in using regex in PHP.
$result = "some very long long string with different kind of links";
$regex='/<.*?href.*?="(.*?net.*?)"/'; //this is the regex rule
preg_match_all($regex,$result,$parts);
Here in this code I'm trying to get the links from the result string. But it will provide me only those links which contains .net. But I also want to get those links which have .com. For this I tried this code
$regex='/<.*?href.*?="(.*?net|com.*?)"/';
But it shows nothing.
SOrry for my bad English.
Update 1 :
now i'm using this
$regex='/<.*?href.*?="(.*?)"/';
this rule grab all the links from the string. But this is not perfect. Because it also grabs other substrings like "javascript".
Your regex gets interpreted as .*?net or com.*?. You'll want (.*?(net|com).*?).
The | character applies to everything within the capturing group, so (.*?net|com.*?) will match either .*?net or com.*?, I think what you want is (.*?(net|com).*?).
If you do not want the extra capturing group, you can use (.*?(?:net|com).*?).
You could also use (.*?net.*?|.*?com.*?), but this is not recommended because of the unnecessary repetition.
Try this:
$regex='/<.*?href.*?="(.*?\.(?:net|com)\b.*?)"/i';
or better:
$regex='/<a .*?href\s*+=\s*+"\K.*?\.(?:net|com)\b[^"]*+/i';
<.*?href
is a problem. This will match from the first < on the current line to the first href, regardless of whether they belong to the same tag.
Generally, it's unwise to try and parse HTML with regexes; if you absolutely insist on doing that, at least be a bit more specific (but still not perfect):
$regex='/<[^<>]*href[^<>=]*="(?:[^"]*(net|com)[^"]*)"/';