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Assign Anchor IDs Using PHP

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Last week, I challenged my readers to create a PHP script that finds anchors in an HTML document and assigns an ID to the element IF the element doesn't have an ID already. Jeremy Parrish stepped up to the challenge.

The PHP

function anchor_fix($anchor)
{
  // the match comes as an array
  // the whole match (what we want) is the 0th element
  if (! preg_match('/\sid="/i', $anchor[0])) {
	 return preg_replace('/name="([^"]*)"/i', 'id="$1" $0', $anchor[0]);
  } else {
	 // already has an id!
	 return $anchor[0];
  }
}

/* usage */
echo preg_replace_callback('/<a[^>]*>/i', 'anchor_fix', file_get_contents('page.html'));

The Result

<body>
	<b>
	<a 
	name="stuff">this is an anchor</a> some text... <a name="another">another one...</a>
	</b>
	<div><a id="thing" name="other">another thing</a>
	</div>
</body>

... becomes ...

<body>
	<b>
	<a 
	id="stuff" name="stuff">this is an anchor</a> some text... <a id="another" name="another">another one...</a>
	</b>
	<div><a id="thing" name="other">another thing</a>
	</div>
</body>

Great job Jeremy!

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