I recently needed to write a regular expression to find HTML and XHTML links with title attributes (<a href="http://www.gustavus.edu" title="Visit the Gustavus Adolphus College homepage">Gustavus</a>). Here it is:
<a[[:print:]]*title=('|"")?(.*?(?=1))1?[[:print:]]*>([[:print:]]*)</a>Note that the [[:print:]] parts are applicable to ColdFusion regular expressions and would have to be changed to something else if you aren’t using ColdFusion. Additionally, the ('|"") part uses the double-double quote escape syntax because the regular expression is passed in between double quotes.
I was at a major roadblock when writing this regular expression until I found out about wildcard non-greedy quantifier and used it with the positive lookahead/backreference combo. This critical section is the part that says (.*?(?=1)). This basically means grab any amount of any character until the next occurrence of the first backreference (in this case either ‘ or “). Brilliant.
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hello…what about if i want to use the same reg exp in PHP
<a>([[:print:]]*)</a>Great question. Here is what I have come up with for PHP:
/(<a\s[^>]*?title=([\'"])?([^>]*?(?=\2))\2?([^>]*?)>)(.*?)(<\/a>)/is