PHP: extract links AND description from html

[Nils Jansen]

extracting just the links from a webpage is no problem for me ->
regex /<a ([^>]*)>/i

but now i want to extract the link and the discription that stands between
the <a href=> and the </a> tag.

as a result from the script that i'm searching for, i want to get the full

<a href=http://www.blabla.com/test/d.html>DESCRIPTOIN</a>

can anybody give me some hint, how to do this?

[Janwillem Borleffs]

Nils Jansen wrote:

> as a result from the script that i'm searching for, i want to get the
> full
>
> <a href=http://www.blabla.com/test/d.html>DESCRIPTOIN</a>
>
> can anybody give me some hint, how to do this?

Try this (remark: array_combine is a PHP 5 specific function, see the manual
entry for this function on php.net for a PHP 4 example);

<?php

// Fetch the content
$file = file_get_contents("http://www.php.net/");

// Construct the regular expression
// (does not accept image links)
$reg = "#<a.*href\s*=\s*(\"|')?([^\"'>]+).*>([^<>]+)</a>#i";

// Parse $file
if (preg_match_all($reg, $file, $matches)) {
print "<pre>";
print_r(array_combine($matches[2], $matches[3]));
print "</pre>";
}

?>


HTH;
JW