an autolink filter?

[rebelo]

I am need to take the data from a textarea field in an html form and wherever there is a link, automatically create an <a href="foo.htm">bar</a> from the link. Criteria would be like if it's www and there are two dots with chars on either side type of thing.

Anyone know where there's a prebuilt function available for free? Or anyone have one to let me use? Just don't feel like learning how right now as I am very busy with other stuff. Otherwise, it will just have to wait.

Anything is much appreciated.

[the_Igel]

You need regular expressions here. try searching the forum or the Net for perfect one, but quick'n'dirty is like

$string = preg_replace('#([url]http://[/url])?www.([a-z0-9-]+.)+[a-z]{2,4}#', '<a href="\0">\0</a>', $string);

where $string is text you get from the form.

[jburfield]

Check out preg_replace.

You can do something along these lines:

$text = "xxxx"; / the text you want to create links in /

$text = preg_replace("/\b((http(s?):\/\/)|(www.))([\w.]+)([\/\w+.]+)([\S.]+)/i", "<a href=\"http$3://$4$5$6$7\" target=\"_new\">$2$4$5$6$7</a>", $text);

That should make links out of anything starting with 'http://', 'https://', or just 'www'

-- Jason

[the_Igel]

Originally posted by jburfield
$text = preg_replace("/\b((http(s?):\/\/)|(www.))([\w.]+)([\/\w+.]+)([\S.]+)/i", "<a href=\"http$3://$4$5$6$7\" target=\"_new\">$2$4$5$6$7</a>", $text);

Wow! That's great! Just a couple of remarks:

1. I'd rather use not slash for delimiter, but some other character, to make it more readable.
2. URL can't start with dot.
3. "\w" isn't correct here: it stands for [a-z0-9_] (case insensitive), whereas url characters are [a-z0-9-] (hyphen and not underscore).
4. And, of course, valid URL ends not only when spaces or fullstop are met, but also with a lot of punctuation and special characters.