How to extract all URL's from webpage in an array an see if certain value is there - arrays

Question

I am trying to extract all the links from a webpage and put them into an array that I can then compare values with to see if there is a match. The problem that I'm having is I cannot seem to get the values into an array. I am able to see all the links and I see that there is a match with the one I'm trying to compare with but it's not recognizing that it's there. My code is as follows. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
$content = file_get_contents("sample_url");
$content = strip_tags($content, "<a>");
$subString = preg_split("/<\/a>/", $content);
$items = array();
foreach ( $subString as $val ){
if( strpos($val, "<a href=") !== FALSE ) {
$val = preg_replace("/.*<a\s+href=\"/sm", "", $val);
$val = preg_replace("/\".*/", "", $val);
$items[] = $val;
var_dump($val . "<br />");
}
}
if (in_array($testing_link, $items, true)) {
echo 'It is here!';
}
else {
echo 'it is NOT here :( ';
}

Answer 1

Better to use the DOMDocument to get the links into an array. Like this:
$doc = new DOMDocument();
// the string containing all the URLs and stuff
$doc->loadHTML($content);
//Extract the links from the HTML. From https://thisinterestsme.com/php-find-links-in-html/
$links = $doc->getElementsByTagName('a');
//Array that will contain our extracted links.
$extracted_links = array();
//Loop through the DOMNodeList.
//We can do this because the DOMNodeList object is traversable.
foreach ($links as $link) {
//Get the link text.
//$linkText = $link->nodeValue;
//Get the link in the href attribute.
$linkHref = $link->getAttribute('href');
}
Now all the HREFS are in the $linkHref array.
Better to use DOMDocument rather than RegEx. Much easier, and more accurate and consistent in results.