Whether you’re creating your own custom blog, tweaking a CMS or building a plugin this is one block of code that can come in very handy. I’ve used this many times over the years and it has always served me well. I will admit, I am terrible with regular expressions and found this a while back, so I can take no credit for it. Usually I use something like txt2re when I a cutomer regular expression.
$pattern = "@\b(https?://)?(([0-9a-zA-Z_!~*'().&=+$%-]+:)?[0-9a-zA-Z_!~*'().&=+$%-]+\@)?(([0-9]{1,3}\.){3}[0-9]{1,3}|([0-9a-zA-Z_!~*'()-]+\.)*([0-9a-zA-Z][0-9a-zA-Z-]{0,61})?[0-9a-zA-Z]\.[a-zA-Z]{2,6})(:[0-9]{1,4})?((/[0-9a-zA-Z_!~*'().;?:\@&=+$,%#-]+)*/?)@";
$text = preg_replace($pattern, '<a href="\0">\0</a>', $text_raw);
Hopefully someone else finds it useful 😀
A seasoned Senior Solutions Architect with 18 years of experience in technology design and implementation. Renowned for innovative solutions and strategic insights, he excels in driving complex projects to success. Outside work, he is a passionate fisherman and fish keeper, specializing in planted tanks.
Have you ever had this not work and bork all of the links? I’m always afraid this is going to happen with wide-scale regular expressions :S
i added {0,1} after \. at character 188 in $pattern and now it seems to convert raw_text without extension too, which is useful with mod_rewrite.
an asterisk would have worked too, but my solutions seems more precise
It seems like this might be better done in javascript rather than php, just in case it “borks all of the links” (also you could have an enable/disable links button)
I am having some issues implementing this in javascript. How would you implement this in javascript? Thanks for the post nonetheless.
ps to my post:
I realized a simple ‘?’ in place of {0,1} would do…
Great job – very similar to one I saw elsewhere – but adds the effect of picking up www strings which don’t start with http.
The only loss is that in that case, the http isn’t added to the start of the href!