PHP DomDocument to replace pattern

Question

I need to find and replace http links to hyperlinks. These http links are inside span tags.

$text has html page. One of the span tags has something like

<span class="styleonetwo" >http://www.cnn.com/live-event</span>

Here is my code:

$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTML($text);
foreach($doc->getElementsByTagName('span') as $anchor) {
    $link = $anchor->nodeValue;
    if(substr($link, 0, 4) == "http")
    {
        $link = "<a href=\"$link\">$link</a>";
    }
    if(substr($link, 0, 3) == "www")
    {
        $link = "<a href=\"http://$link\">$link</a>";
    }    
    $anchor->nodeValue = $link;
}
echo $doc->saveHTML();

It works ok. However...I want this to work even if the data inside span is something like:

<span class="styleonetwo" > sometexthere http://www.cnn.com/live-event somemoretexthere</span>

Obviously above code wont work for this situation. Is there a way we can search and replace a pattern using DOMDocument without using preg_replace?

Update: To answer phil's question regarding preg_replace:

I used regexpal.com to test the following pattern matching:

\b(?:(?:https?|ftp|file)://|(www|ftp)\.)[-A-Z0-9+&@#/%?=~_|$!:,.;]*[-A-Z0-9+&@#/%=~_|$]

It works great in the regextester provided in regexpal. When I use the same pattern in PHP code, I got tons of weird errors. I got unknown modifier error even for escape character! Following is my code for preg_replace

$httpRegex = '/\b(\?:(\?:https?|ftp|file):\/\/|(www|ftp)\.)[-A-Z0-9+&@#/%\?=~_|$!:,.;]*[-A-Z0-9+&@#/%=~_|$]/';
$cleanText = preg_replace($httpRegex, "<a href='$0'>$0</a>", $text);

I was so frustrated with "unknown modifiers" and pursued DOMDocument to solve my problem.

Your regex is not escaped. You have to escape the escape character and the delimiter! — Tivie
– Tivie, Commented Oct 18, 2012 at 2:01

NikitaBaksalyar · Accepted Answer · 2012-10-18 02:01:00Z

2

Regular expressions well suit this problem - so better use preg_replace.

Now you just have several unescaped delimiters in your pattern, so escape them or choose another character as the delimiter - for instance, ^. Thus, the correct pattern would be:

$httpRegex = '^\b(?:(?:https?|ftp|file):\/\/|(www|ftp)\.)[-A-Z0-9+&@#\/%\?=~_|$!:,.;]*[-A-Z0-9+&@#\/%=~_|$]^i';

answered Oct 18, 2012 at 2:01

NikitaBaksalyar

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2 Comments

love2code94 Over a year ago

Thanks Nikita! It helps. When I do preg_replace($httpRegex, "<a href='$0'>$0</a>", $text); it gives me a link without "http". I could replace the code with preg_replace($httpRegex, "http://$0", $text); But, it would give me codehttp:/code if the link in the text is codesomethingcode. I could have links like code<span>wwww.link.com</span>code or code<span>link.com</span>code. Should I need to write two regex to solve this? Thanks again.

NikitaBaksalyar Over a year ago

I would use a preg_replace_callback function - here's an example: pastebin.com/GfPjtbku

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