Replace a tag with href link

Question

I have a html source code and want to replace all <a> tags with its containing href link.

So the tag looks like:

<a href="http://google.com" target="_blank">click here</a>

I expect as output:

http://google.com

I already tried some regex in combination with preg_replace, but none of them give me the href content.

So what would be the best way to do this?

Answer 1

Match with regex <a .*href="([^"]*)".*?<\\/a> and replace with first group using \\1 or $1 .

Regex101 Demo

Answer 2

<?php
$text = '
  Random text <a href="foobar.html">Foobar</a> More Text
  Other text <a href="http://www.example.com">An example</a>
  Still more text <a href="http://www.example.com/foo/bar.html">A deep link</a>. The end.
';

preg_match_all('/<a href="(.*?)"/i',$text,$matches);
foreach ($matches[1] as $match) {
    print "A link: $match\n";
}

The result:

A link: foobar.html
A link: http://www.example.com
A link: http://www.example.com/foo/bar.html