How to: extract IMG tag attributes from HTML with PHP

Using regexp to solve this kind of problem is a bad idea and will likely lead in unmaintainable and unreliable code. Better us an HTML parser.

Solution With regexp

In that case it's better to split the process in two parts :

• get all the img tag
• extract their metadata

I will assume your doc is not xHTML strict so you can't use an XML parsor. E.G. with this web page source code :

/* preg_match_all match the regexp in all the $html string and output everything as 
an array in $result. "i" option is used to make it case insensitive */

preg_match_all('/<img[^>]+>/i',$html, $result); 

print_r($result);
Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [0] => <img src="/Content/Img/stackoverflow-logo-250.png" width="250" height="70" alt="logo link to homepage" />
            [1] => <img class="vote-up" src="/content/img/vote-arrow-up.png" alt="vote up" title="This was helpful (click again to undo)" />
            [2] => <img class="vote-down" src="/content/img/vote-arrow-down.png" alt="vote down" title="This was not helpful (click again to undo)" />
            [3] => <img src="http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/df299babc56f0a79678e567e87a09c31?s=32&d=identicon&r=PG" height=32 width=32 alt="gravatar image" />
            [4] => <img class="vote-up" src="/content/img/vote-arrow-up.png" alt="vote up" title="This was helpful (click again to undo)" />

[...]
        )

)

Then we get all the img tag attributes with a loop :

$img = array();
foreach( $result as $img_tag)
{
    preg_match_all('/(alt|title|src)=("[^"]*")/i',$img_tag, $img[$img_tag]);
}

print_r($img);

Array
(
    [<img src="/Content/Img/stackoverflow-logo-250.png" width="250" height="70" alt="logo link to homepage" />] => Array
        (
            [0] => Array
                (
                    [0] => src="/Content/Img/stackoverflow-logo-250.png"
                    [1] => alt="logo link to homepage"
                )

            [1] => Array
                (
                    [0] => src
                    [1] => alt
                )

            [2] => Array
                (
                    [0] => "/Content/Img/stackoverflow-logo-250.png"
                    [1] => "logo link to homepage"
                )

        )

    [<img class="vote-up" src="/content/img/vote-arrow-up.png" alt="vote up" title="This was helpful (click again to undo)" />] => Array
        (
            [0] => Array
                (
                    [0] => src="/content/img/vote-arrow-up.png"
                    [1] => alt="vote up"
                    [2] => title="This was helpful (click again to undo)"
                )

            [1] => Array
                (
                    [0] => src
                    [1] => alt
                    [2] => title
                )

            [2] => Array
                (
                    [0] => "/content/img/vote-arrow-up.png"
                    [1] => "vote up"
                    [2] => "This was helpful (click again to undo)"
                )

        )

    [<img class="vote-down" src="/content/img/vote-arrow-down.png" alt="vote down" title="This was not helpful (click again to undo)" />] => Array
        (
            [0] => Array
                (
                    [0] => src="/content/img/vote-arrow-down.png"
                    [1] => alt="vote down"
                    [2] => title="This was not helpful (click again to undo)"
                )

            [1] => Array
                (
                    [0] => src
                    [1] => alt
                    [2] => title
                )

            [2] => Array
                (
                    [0] => "/content/img/vote-arrow-down.png"
                    [1] => "vote down"
                    [2] => "This was not helpful (click again to undo)"
                )

        )

    [<img src="http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/df299babc56f0a79678e567e87a09c31?s=32&d=identicon&r=PG" height=32 width=32 alt="gravatar image" />] => Array
        (
            [0] => Array
                (
                    [0] => src="http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/df299babc56f0a79678e567e87a09c31?s=32&d=identicon&r=PG"
                    [1] => alt="gravatar image"
                )

            [1] => Array
                (
                    [0] => src
                    [1] => alt
                )

            [2] => Array
                (
                    [0] => "http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/df299babc56f0a79678e567e87a09c31?s=32&d=identicon&r=PG"
                    [1] => "gravatar image"
                )

        )

   [..]
        )

)

Regexps are CPU intensive so you may wan to cache this page. If you have no cache system, you can tweak your own by using ob_start and loading / saving from a text file.

How does this stuff work ?

First, we use preg_ match_ all, a function that gets every string matching the pattern and ouput it in its third parameter.

The regexps :

<img[^>]+>

We apply it on the all html web page. It can be read as every string that start with "<img", contains non ">" char and ends with a >.

(alt|title|src)=("[^"]*")

We apply it successively on each img tag. It can be read as every string starting with "alt", "title" or "src", then a "=", then a ' " ', a bunch of stuff that are not ' " ' and ends with a ' " '. Isolate the sub-strings between ().

Finally, everytime you want to deal with regexps, it handy to have good tools to quickly test them. Check this online regexp tester.