Turn Plain Text URLs into Active Links using PHP
Posted on September 3, 2009 | Category: Tutorials
I was putting together a bit of code to pull in a Twitter feed, similar to what you see in the footer of bavotasan.com. I got everything working properly but the only problem was all of the URLs were just plain text instead of active links. I figured out a way to automatically turn the URLs into active links using a small piece of PHP.
$text = ereg_replace("[[:alpha:]]+://[^<>[:space:]]+[[:alnum:]/]","<a href=\"\\0\">\\0</a>", $text);
The code finds all instances of http:// and converts the string into an active link by surrounding it with an anchor tag.
Chris, just as a way to help some of the non-technical people out there you could wrap this code in a simple function and make it a lot easier for them.
function HyperlinkText($text) {return ereg_replace("[[:alpha:]]+://[^<>[:space:]]+[[:alnum:]/]", "<a href=\"\\">\</a>", $text);
}
If people put this function in the bottom of their PHP file, they can now simply call it throughout the code by typing:
echo HyperlinkText("Your http://thisismyurl.com here.");Thx. Great tip.
Cool.. But I’ve noticed, that this will not work, if the URL contains parameters.
Ex:
http://macknonalds.0fees.net/index.php?para=1¶=2
Do you have any idea, on how to properly place regex, to accommodate this kind of URL inputs?
Thanks