regular expression / php / analytics question

ChicoMendez

Hi,
I'll be sending out a newsletter and i want to track clicks through GA. my idea is that i will grab all the links from the NL body and send them to a redirect script (with the GA campaign,source variables appended)
the reason that i will use this redirect script is becuase some of the links in the NL will be external sites.

is then a way with regular expressions to grab all the links and link text from a text block :

<a href="link"> linktext </a>


so as i can go


foreach($matchedlinks as $singlelink){
echo $singlelink->link;
echo $singlelink->linktext;

}



thanks

James G

(note: haven't used php in a while)

You should be able to grab the links and store them in an array using preg_match_all.
For the regexp, something like /^<a href="(.+)">(.+)<\/a>$/ should work fine.

Placebo

how are you sending this newsletter ? i hope its not through a homebrew app

ChicoMendez

Placebo wrote: »

how are you sending this newsletter ? i hope its not through a homebrew app

whys that ?

ChicoMendez

hi there,

does anyone know how i would extract the title value from the link also please ?

what changes would i need to make to :

$regexp = "/<a\s[^>]*href=(\"??)(http[^\" >]*?)\\1[^>]*>(.*)<\/a>/siU";


Many thanks !

Ross

Might be better off using a library like Simple HTML DOM or PHP's DOM API.

Looks like overkill, but could save you some headaches down the road.