help with (.+) the greedy b-tard.

[micah1701]

I want to parse a string of html and make any link going to a PDF open in a new window.

 

all the links are relative; so they're either:

href="/folder/filename.pdf"

or

href="filename.pdf"

 

This is what I've come up with:

 

<?php
$string = 'long string of <a href="/some/folder/file.pdf">html</a> and links';

   $pattern = '/href="(\/)?(.+?)\.pdf"/si';
   $replace = 'href="$1$2.pdf" target="_blank"';
   $string = preg_replace($pattern, $replace, $string);
?>

 

but its just not working.  very frustrating.

Any thoughts?

 

Thanks!!!

[effigy]

It works for me chief, as does this:

 

<pre>
<?php
$string = 'long string of <a href="/some/folder/file.pdf">html</a> and links';
$pattern = '%(href="/?(?:[^"]+)\.pdf")%si';
$replace = '$1 target="_blank"';
echo $string = preg_replace($pattern, $replace, $string);
?>
</pre> 

[micah1701]

my bad...  since you mentioned it worked for you I started looking out of the box and realized there was another problem on my end causing it to not work correctly, completely unrelated to the regex.

 

I do like your code snippet better then mine, so thanks for that!!!

 

I always learn something new when I post a question in this section of the site...even when it turns out I didn't have a real problem after all.

 

Thanks again!

[effigy]

Just a quick note about a mistake on my part--the (?:...) wrapper is unnecessary. I'm not sure how that got in there