Regular Expression for replacing a-Tags in HTML where href-attribute starting with http://

Question

I want to match all Links in my HTML-content-variable where the href starts with http://www.example.com

Example

should match:

<a href="http://www.example.com">foo</a>

shouldn't match:

<a href="/bar/">bar</a>

also match (with linebreaks and other HTML-tags inside anchor):

<a class="bla" id="blubb" href="http://www.example.com/asdf/" title="oops">
<img src="..." alt="" />
</a>

I started with something like this:

<CFSAVECONTENT variable="html">
    <a class="bla" id="blubb" href="http://www.example.com/asdf/" title="oops">
        <img src="..." alt="" /> some Text
    </a>
</CFSAVECONTENT>
<CFSET result = REReplace(html, "<a[^>]*href="http://www\.example\.com[^"]*"[^>]?>([^<]+)</a>", "\1") />

but of course this one wouldn't match my last link example with the img-tag inside a-tag...

Any hints on this one?

Upon further investigation, the question title doesn't match what you are asking: Do you want to match all links that start with http://, or all links that start with example.com ? I'll have to modify my answer based on what you want. — Shawn Holmes

Shawn Holmes Shawn Holmes · Accepted Answer · 2011-10-06T15:49:50

Assuming:

<CFSAVECONTENT variable="html">
    <a class="bla" id="blubb" href="http://www.example.com/asdf/" title="oops">
        <img src="..." alt="" /> some Text
    </a>
    <a href="http://www.example.com/foo">foo</a>
    <a href="http://www.yahoo.com">abc</a>
    <a href="http://www.example.com/bar">bar</a>
</CFSAVECONTENT>

Use:

<cfset links = ReMatch('<a[^>]*href="http://www\.example\.com[^"]*"[^>]*>(.+?)</a>', html) />

'links' is now an array of matched URLs (anchors 1, 2, and 4 should be in the array).

Bear in mind my answer was framed under the assumption you wanted to match all anchors that start with http://www.example.com, which may not necessarily match what you were asking in the title of this question.

Regular Expression for replacing a-Tags in HTML where href-attribute starting with http://

2 Answers