Search and replace on a navigation string

PHP
1

I need to do a search and replace (possibly using a regular expression search) to append ?pb=1 to every link found in a string. For example in the following html I want to make:-

href=“http://mynerja.com/about/balcon-de-europa-nerja/”
into
href=“http://mynerja.com/about/balcon-de-europa-nerja/?pb=1”.

I need to do this dynamically in PHP for all the links in the string.

Thanks for any suggestions and I hope the above makes sense.

<li class="page_item page-item-1225"><a class="fadeThis" href="http://mynerja.com/about/balcon-de-europa-nerja/"><span>Balcon de Europa, Nerja</span></a></li>
	<li class="page_item page-item-1452"><a class="fadeThis" href="http://mynerja.com/about/beaches-in-nerja/"><span>Beaches in Nerja</span></a></li>
	<li class="page_item page-item-2958"><a class="fadeThis" href="http://mynerja.com/about/charities-in-nerja/"><span>Charities in Nerja CAS, Nerja Donkey Sanctuary, CUDECA</span></a></li>
2

Hi there,

If we define a ‘link’ as what comes between href=" and the closing "
then we can use the following regex:

/href="(.*?)"/

This would give us:

<?php 
$String ='<li class="page_item page-item-1225"><a class="fadeThis" href="http://mynerja.com/about/balcon-de-europa-nerja/"><span>Balcon de Europa, Nerja</span></a></li>
          <li class="page_item page-item-1452"><a class="fadeThis" href="http://mynerja.com/about/beaches-in-nerja/"><span>Beaches in Nerja</span></a></li>
          <li class="page_item page-item-2958"><a class="fadeThis" href="http://mynerja.com/about/charities-in-nerja/"><span>Charities in Nerja CAS, Nerja Donkey Sanctuary, CUDECA</span></a></li>';

echo preg_replace('/href="(.*?)"/s', 'href="$1?pb=1"', $String);

which should hopefully do what you want.

3

Thanks Pullo - that looks like exactly what I need. I will give it a try and report back.

4

Finally had a chance to try this out this morning and it worked first time. :smiley:

Thanks again for your help.

5

You’re welcome.
Thanks for taking the time to follow up :slight_smile:

6

Just keep in mind a caveat. This works fine as long as none of the links in your string have a querystring on them already.

7

Good point.
How would one go about writing a reg ex that took that into account?

8

same regex, but feed the result into a callback function with [FPHP]preg_replace_callback[/FPHP]

9

Hi StarLion,

What do you think about this solution?
It works, but am I horribly overcomplicating things?

<?php
$String ='<li class="page_item page-item-1225"><a class="fadeThis" href="http://mynerja.com/about/balcon-de-europa-nerja/?param=1"><span>Balcon de Europa, Nerja</span></a></li>
          <li class="page_item page-item-1452"><a class="fadeThis" href="http://mynerja.com/about/beaches-in-nerja/"><span>Beaches in Nerja</span></a></li>
          <li class="page_item page-item-2958"><a class="fadeThis" href="http://mynerja.com/about/charities-in-nerja/"><span>Charities in Nerja CAS, Nerja Donkey Sanctuary, CUDECA</span></a></li>';

function processURL($matches){
  $queryString = (array_key_exists('query', parse_url($matches[2])))? "&pb=1" : "?pb=1";
  return "$matches[1]$matches[2]$queryString$matches[3]";
}

echo preg_replace_callback('/(<li.*?href=")(.*?)(".*?<\\/li>)/', 'processURL', $String);
?>

You will notice I’ve attached a querystring to the first link.

Would be grateful for any feedback.

10

keep the same regex - you only care about the href attributes, so ‘href=“(.*?)”’ will suffice for a pattern, and then the replace would just be

'href="'.$matches[1].$querystring.'"'

(the href and quotes are static elements - so you dont need to pattern them)

11

Oh cool!
That’s much cleaner. Thanks!

Here’s the revised code in case the OP can make use of it:

<?php
$String ='<li class="page_item page-item-1225"><a class="fadeThis" href="http://mynerja.com/about/balcon-de-europa-nerja/?param=1"><span>Balcon de Europa, Nerja</span></a></li>
          <li class="page_item page-item-1452"><a class="fadeThis" href="http://mynerja.com/about/beaches-in-nerja/"><span>Beaches in Nerja</span></a></li>
          <li class="page_item page-item-2958"><a class="fadeThis" href="http://mynerja.com/about/charities-in-nerja/"><span>Charities in Nerja CAS, Nerja Donkey Sanctuary, CUDECA</span></a></li>';

function processURL($matches){
  $queryString = (array_key_exists('query', parse_url($matches[1])))? "&pb=1" : "?pb=1";
  return 'href="'.$matches[1].$queryString.'"';
}

echo preg_replace_callback('/href="(.*?)"/s', 'processURL', $String);
?>