Get link value only from the_content()?

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I have my news in posts and I am trying to display the two latest news articles (posts) on my main page. I’ve got that solved by getting the title using the_title() and getting a little bit of the text using the_excerpt().

I want to show a more… link that takes you to the post. However, some of the news articles that I am posting have some text in the post body that’s a link, how do I only get the link within the body of a post so that my more… link takes your there directly?

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For example, sometimes we will link to news articles in PDFs that are on another server.

I’m using the following code. 

<?php query_posts('category_name=news2011'); ?>
<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
    <?php /* the_ID(); */ ?> 
    <?php /* the_date('F Y'); */ ?>
    <ol class="news">
        <strong><p><?php the_title()?></p></strong>
        <li><?php the_content(); ?></li>
    </ol>
<?php endwhile; endif; ?>
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2 comments

  1. You can scan the content to see whether it contains a link and then parse it to find the href attribute. There are many ways to do this, this example uses the built-in kses functionality, as demonstrated by Otto:

    $post_link = get_the_permalink();
if ( preg_match('/<a (.+?)>/', get_the_content(), $match) ) {
    $link = array();
    foreach ( wp_kses_hair($match[1], array('http')) as $attr) {
        $link[$attr['name']] = $attr['value'];
    }
    $post_link = $link['href'];
}

  2. The above solution is perfect but it will only take http links. By using the below code it will take both http and https links.

    $post_link = get_the_permalink();
if ( preg_match('/<a (.+?)>/', get_the_content(), $match) ) {
    $link = array();
    foreach ( wp_kses_hair($match[1], array('https','http')) as $attr) {
        $link[$attr['name']] = $attr['value'];
    }
    $post_link = $link['href'];
}