Replace the href value of qualifying <a>'s using the tag's visible text

Question

I have a big string with a lot of URLs, I need to replace the URLs that match:

<a href="../plugins/re_records/somefile.php?page=something&id=X">important_name</a>

(where X is an any integer and important_name is any string) with:

<a href="/map/important_name">important_name</a>

I'm using preg_match_all() to match all URLs:

preg_match_all('/\/plugins\/re\_records\/somefile\.php\?page\=something\&id\=*(\d+)/', $bigString, $matches, PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE);

The problem is that I don't understand how to get the important_name from the hyperlink's visible text to become part of the new url after the URL match.

Is it a good idea to use preg_match_all()?

Answer 1

Don't use regex. Use DOMDocument. They are specifically made to parse HTML/XML documents.

Get all anchor tag elements, check for value in href attribute and change the attribute accordingly using setAttribute() method.

Snippet:

<?php

libxml_use_internal_errors(true); // to disable warnings if HTML is not well formed 
$o = new DOMDocument();
$o->loadHTML('<a href="../plugins/re_records/somefile.php?page=something&id=45">important_name</a>');

foreach($o->getElementsByTagName('a') as $anchor_tag){
    $href = $anchor_tag->getAttribute('href');
    if(strpos($href,'/plugins/re_records/somefile.php?page=something&id=') !== false){
        $anchor_tag->setAttribute('href','/map/'.$anchor_tag->nodeValue);
    }
}

echo $o->saveHTML();

Demo: https://3v4l.org/5GPXA