Creating autolinks?

[Anon]

Okay, let me explain what I want to do. I have a table that has the following fields:

id
term
definition

I'm creating an encyclopedia type script, and I would like it so that when a term's definition is displayed, if another term that is part of the database shows up in the definition, it will create an autolink for that term in the definition. Not sure if that makes sense, so let me give an example:

An entry in the encyclopedia about Martin Luther King that happened to mention Malcolm X, would have the words Malcolm X as a link, and clicking on that would take you to the Malcolm X entry.

The problem is, I literally have no clue what kind of query and then output would result in this actually working. Any ideas? Tips to point me in the right direction? Is this hopeless?

[brandonschnell]

you could use a regular expression on each term in the encyclopedia to modify a recognized word/phrase to include the link to the entry.

if the site gets more than a couple of entries, this method would be really slow. you might want to generate the links once per day etc.

check out everything2.com for ideas.