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up vote 0 down vote favorite

I'm using the following regex in PHP to grab the URLs from a string

regex = '/https?\:\/\/[^\" ]+/i';
$string = "lorem ipsum http://google.com lorem ipusm dolor http://yahoo.com/something";
preg_match_all($regex, $string, $matches);
$urls = ($matches[0]);

$urls returns all the URLs. How can return only the first URL? In this case http://google.com.

I'm trying to achieve this without using a foreach loop.

share|improve this question
    
possible duplicate of Finding urls from text string via php and regex? –  Lalit Sharma Jan 28 at 13:19
    
@LalitSharma Not a duplicate –  HamZa Jan 28 at 13:31
    
@CyberJunkie an improved version would be '~https?://[^" ]+~i' –  HamZa Jan 28 at 13:32

5 Answers 5

up vote 3 down vote accepted

According to the documentation:

preg_match_all — Perform a global regular expression match

Since you are after just one, you should be using preg_match:

Perform a regular expression match

$regex = '/https?\:\/\/[^\" ]+/i';
$string = "lorem ipsum http://google.com lorem ipusm dolor http://yahoo.com/something";
preg_match($regex, $string, $matches);
echo $matches[0];

Yields:

http://google.com
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up vote 2 down vote

preg_match_all() has a flag parameter which you can use to order the results. The parameter in which you have the variable $matches is your results and should be listed in that array. 

$matches[0][0];//is your first item.
$matches[0][1];//is your second

It would be better to use preg_match() rather than preg_match_all().

Here's the documentation on preg_match_all() for your flags. Link here!

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up vote 1 down vote

Use preg_match instead of preg_match_all

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up vote 0 down vote 
^.*?(https?\:\/\/[^\" ]+)

Try this.Grab the capture or group.See demo.

https://regex101.com/r/pM9yO9/5

$re = "/^.*?(https?\\:\\/\\/[^\\\" ]+)/";
$str = "lorem ipsum http://google.com lorem ipusm dolor http://yahoo.com/something";

preg_match_all($re, $str, $matches);
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up vote 0 down vote

Just print the 0th index.

$regex = '/https?\:\/\/[^\" ]+/i';
$string = "lorem ipsum http://google.com lorem ipusm dolor http://yahoo.com/something";
preg_match_all($regex, $string, $matches);
$urls = ($matches[0]);
print_r($urls[0]);

Output:

http://google.com
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