Find first image URL in WordPress post content

Created:29 Dec 2016 06:59:28 , in  Web development

Find first image URL in the article with PHP.

function find_first_image_src($post) {
    $matches = array();
	preg_match_all('/<img.+src=[\'"]([^\'"]+)[\'"].*>/i', $post->post_content, $matches);
	return count($matches[1]) > 0 ? $matches[1][0] : NULL;
}

Usage

if(isset(find_first_image_src($post))){
    //do stuff here ...
}else{
    // no image found in the post contents
}

$post variable is a WordPress $post object. It is available through global variable $post.

global $post;
$first_img_url = find_first_image_src($post);

or if you need a post with a specific ID instead of the current post, you can get it with get_post() as follows:

$post = get_post(get_the_ID());
if( isset($post) ){
  $first_img_url = find_first_image_src($post);
  // do stuff with first_img_url 
}  

More than one image URL

The above technique can be easily adapted to find not only the first image URL but any post image URL. Just replace 0 in $matches[1][0] with whatever number you need (since $matches[1] is a PHP array, matches are 0 indexed), if you need all the post image URLs, just grab $matches[1].

This post was updated on 06 Oct 2021 20:42:32

Tags:  image ,  php ,  wordpress