How do I extract HTML img sources with a regular expression? - regex

Question

I need to extract the src element from all image tags in an HTML document.
So, the input is an HTML page and the output would be a list of URL's pointing to images:
ex... http://www.google.com/intl/en_ALL/images/logo.gif
The following is what I came up with so far:
<img\s+src=""(http://.*?)
This does not work for tags where the src isn't directly after the img tag, for example:
<img height="1px" src="spacer.gif">
Can someone help complete this regular expression? It's pretty easy, but I thought this may be a faster way to get an answer.

Answer 1

The following regexp snippet should work.
<img[^>]+src="([^">]+)"
It looks for text that starts with <img, followed by one or more characters that are not >, then src=". It then grabs everything between that point and the next " or >.
But if at all possible, use a real HTML parser. It's more solid, and will handle edge cases much better.

Answer 2

You don't want to do that. Correctly parsing HTML is a very complex problem, and regular expressions are not a good tool for that.
See e.g.
Can you provide some examples of why it is hard to parse XML and HTML with a regex?
And here for a good solution:
How do I programatically inspect a HTML document

Answer 3

You could do this pretty easily with Javascript. An example would be like below:
var images = document.getElementsByTagName("img");
for (i=0; i < images.length; i++)
{
// get image src
var currImage = images[i].src;
// do link creation here
}

Answer 4

This works great for me
$regexp = '<img[^>]+src=(?:\"|\')\K(.[^">]+?)(?=\"|\')';
if(preg_match_all("/$regexp/", $content, $matches, PREG_SET_ORDER)) {
if( !empty($matches) ) {
for ($i=0; $i <= count($matches); $i++)
{
$img_src = $matches[$i][0];
echo $img_src;
}
}
}