Extract a link in the_content()

Question

I'm trying to improve a bookmarks manager/theme I've built (http://bookmarkie.waterstreetgm.org).

Right now, each post is simply a link:

<a href="http://tumblr.everlane.com/page/4">Everlane Tumblr</a>. ie: that one single link is the entire content of the_content().

Easy enough and works great. Next, I want to be able to get a screenshot of the site via WordPress.com's mShots.

Problem is, I can't seem to extract that link from the_content() and feed it into the <img src="">.

If that wasn't clear, here's what I'm trying to do:

<img src="http://s.wordpress.com/mshots/v1/the-link-extracted-from-the_content()/?w=1024" />

I've tried severalvariations on this:

$content = get_the_content();
$link = preg_match_all('#\bhttps?://[^\s()<>]+(?:\([\w\d]+\)|([^[:punct:]\s]|/))#', $content, $match);

But I can't achieve the basic task of extracting that link from the_content(). At the moment, I simply get a formatted link output. I can't find a way to grab the url instead of grabbing the whole link.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Answer 1

You're just looking in the wrong place:

php > $txt = '<a href="http://tumblr.everlane.com/page/4">Everlane Tumblr</a>';
php > $matches = array();
php > echo preg_match_all('#\bhttps?://[^\s()<>]+(?:\([\w\d]+\)|([^[:punct:]\s]|/))#', $txt, $matches);
1
php > print_r($matches);
Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [0] => http://tumblr.everlane.com/page/4
        )

    [1] => Array
        (
            [0] => 4
        )
)

Answer 2

Instead of putting a link in the content area why don't you just put the URL in a custom field. Then you can construct the heading for the post and the tag for screenshot image within your template.

Even better would be to create a custom post type that didn't have a title or content area and just a custom meta box with a field for the URL.