John Davidson

Message:

I am facing a problem, when I try to change the href of a link in a mustache template using DOMDocument.

Consider the following code:

$template = "<a href='{{url}}'>Link</a>";



$document = new DOMDocument();

$document->loadHTML($template, LIBXML_HTML_NOIMPLIED | LIBXML_HTML_NODEFDTD | LIBXML_NOXMLDECL);



foreach ($document->getElementsByTagName('a') as $link) $link->setAttribute('href', 'https://myurl.com?redirect=' . $link->getAttribute('href'));



$template = $document->saveHTML();

echo $template; // <a href='https://myurl.com?redirect=%7B%7Burl%7D%7D'>Link</a>

If later I try to render this via mustache, I won't be able ofc because the {{}} part was encoded. Is there any way to tell DOMDocument to stop auto validating my href attributes? Or is there any alternative with which I can easily get a html string, find all <a></a> elements in it, and change their href attribute?

EDIT: Obviously this is a simple example, and in my real life scenario it is not a possibility for me, to prerender the HTML with mustache, and replace the links then.

---

My Answer:
One possible solution is to use a regular expression to find and replace the href attribute in the HTML string before loading it into the DOMDocument. Here's an example:

php
$template = "Link";

// Replace the {{url}} placeholder with the actual URL
$template = str_replace("{{url}}", "https://example.com", $template);

// Use a regular expression to find and replace the href attribute
$template = preg_replace("/]*\s+)?href=('|\"){{(.*?)}}('|\")/", " // Do any additional processing if needed
}

$template = $document->saveHTML();
echo $template;


This way, you can manipulate the href attribute before it gets encoded by the DOMDocument. Just make sure to adjust the regular expression pattern to match your specific needs.