Matching SRC attribute of IMG tag using preg_match

Here's a way to do it with built-in functions (php >= 4):

$parser = xml_parser_create();
xml_parse_into_struct($parser, $html, $values);
foreach ($values as $key => $val) {
    if ($val['tag'] == 'IMG') {
        $first_src = $val['attributes']['SRC'];
        break;
    }
}

echo $first_src;  // images/stories/otakuzoku1.jpg

Try:

include ("htmlparser.inc"); // from: http://php-html.sourceforge.net/

$html = 'bla <img src="images/stories/otakuzoku1.jpg" border="0" alt="Inside Otakuzoku\'s store" /> noise <img src="das" /> foo';

$parser = new HtmlParser($html);

while($parser->parse()) {
    if($parser->iNodeName == 'img') {
        echo $parser->iNodeAttributes['src'];
        break;
    }
}

which will produce:

images/stories/otakuzoku1.jpg

It should work with PHP 4.x.

If you need to use preg_match() itself, try this:

 preg_match('/(?<!_)src=([\'"])?(.*?)\\1/',$content, $matches);

Your expression is incorrect. Try:

preg_match('/< *img[^>]*src *= *["\']?([^"\']*)/i', $row->introtext, $matches);

Note the removal of brackets around img and src and some other cleanups.