activating URL's in a form

[Anon]

Hi all! This rook wants to know if there is a way for my forms to recognize URL's in say a text box and to output them as links?

E.G. www.link.com will become active by just submiting this post to this board. Naturally, I would like it to recognize http, and ftp as well. Do i need to build a function to do this by sorting for any line that starts with http, ftp, and www? Is there one built in already?

Help! I'd pull my hair out if I had any, but I just can't seem to find anything on this. Thanks in advance.

[Anon]

Try using regular expressions.

$string = preg_replace("/((http:\/\/|http:\/\/www|www)+.[^\s]+)/i",'<a href="\1" target="new">\1</a>', $string);

This one will make a link clickable if it is in the following formats...

www.whatever.com
http://www.whatever.com
http://whatever.com

The above regex will turn those urls into

<a href="http://www.whatever.com">http://www.whatever.com</a>

The href will always get the http:// prepended, but the actual printed link will be whatever your link was in the string.

[Anon]

Thanks my man, I'll give this a go!