Philadelphia Reflections

Regex URL Matching

On this site we check for the existence of a URL whenever an entry is updated

There are two key technologies at work

• A PHP function that checks whether a URL is valid (thanks to marufit at gmail dot com in the PHP Manual)
• 
  
• Regex (regular expression) in a preg_replace_callback routine; this one is mine, all mine

function url_exists($url) 
{
// 
// checks whether a URL actually exists on the Internet
//
$handle   = curl_init($url);
if (false === $handle)
   {
    return false;
   }
curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, true); 
curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_NOBODY, true);
curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, false);
$connectable = curl_exec($handle);
curl_close($handle);   
return $connectable;
}


function aExists($matches)
{
//
// function called by preg_replace_callback
//
// $matches[0] is the complete match
// $matches[1] the match for the first subpattern
//	enclosed in '(...)' and so on

//
// checks to see if a regular link exists
// something similar is done for img src= also
//

$srcURL = $matches[3];
		
if (url_exists($srcURL)) {do something; return "";}  
else {do something else; return "";}
}

$foo = preg_replace_callback(
            '/(.*?)(<a .*?href=")([^"]*)("[^>]*>)(.*?)(<\/a>)/i',
            "aExists",
            $source_string);

(my thanks to https://centricle.com/tools/html-entities/ for HTML encoding)

Originally published: Wednesday, December 12, 2007; most-recently modified: Monday, June 04, 2012