Selecting link inside href PHP

How do I select http://test.com/ out of this HTML:

<a target="_new" href="http://test.com/" title="test">$293.00</a>

I realize I should use a DOM parser, however its for a few lines of code and I'd rather just use regex.

I've tried this with n开发者_StackOverflow中文版o success:

preg_match('/(http|https)\:\/\/[a-zA-Z0-9\-\.]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,3}(\/\S*)?/', $html, $url);   

Thanks.

You can solve this with lookarounds:

if (preg_match('/(?<=href=").*?(?=")/', $html, $groups)) {
    $url = $groups[0];
} else {
    $url = "";
}

• (?<=href=") means: find a position immediately after href="
• Then match anything, but as little as possible with .*? -- this is saved in groups[0]
• Stop, when you found a position where the next character is "

When I don't use a DOM parser, it means that I am pretty sure about the contents, and end up with something REALLY simple... like this...

preg_match('/href="([^"]+)"/', $html, $regs);

url will be in $regs[1].

If you just want the href, all you have to do is preg_match('/href="([^"]*?)/', $html, $matches) and then grab the content of $matches[1].

Well, certainly your parser doesn't match tons of legal URLs. More usefully, see http://mathiasbynens.be/demo/url-regex

Note more specifically, /\S* matches /" which is not what you want, presumably.