php - regexp for finding everything between <a> and </a> tags

Question

I'm trying to find a way to make a list of everything between <a> and </a> tags. So I have a list of links and I want to get the names of the links (not where the links go, but what they're called on the page). Would be really helpful to me.

Currently I have this:

$lines = preg_split("/
?
|
/", $content);  // content is the given page
foreach ($lines as $val) {
  if (preg_match("/(<A(.*)>)(</A>)/", $val, $alink)) {     
    $newurl = $alink[1];

    // put in array of found links
    $links[$index] = $newurl;
    $index++;
    $is_href = true;
  }
}

Answer 1

The standard disclaimer applies: Parsing HTML with regular expressions is not ideal. Success depends on the well-formedness of the input on a character-by-character level. If you cannot guarantee this, the regex will fail to do the Right Thing at some point.

Having said that:

<a[^>]*>(.*?)</a>   // match group one will contain the link text