mailto & http link

[sahib]

Hi,

I'm a newbie to PHP. So I'm sorry if this question is too basic

I tried to hyperlink all urls in the text field which is coming from mysql database.

I found the following code in this forum

function urlise($string)
{
  $patterns = array("/\[url\](.*)\[\/url\]/", "/\s(f|ht)(tps?:\/\/)(\S*)/", "/\[url=(.*)\](.*)\[\/url\]/");
  $replaces = array("<a href=\"\\1\">\\1</a>", " <a href=\"\\1\\2\\3\" target=\"_blank\">\\1\\2\\3</a>", "<a href=\"\\1\" target=\"_blank\">\\2</a>");

  $string = preg_replace($patterns, $replaces, $string);

  return $string;
}

This works fine for the web urls.

The problem with this is when the link is at the end of text it's not adding the hyperlink. If we put a space after that then it works.

Also how to give links to the mail address as well?

Kindly help me with this

Thanks

[paulnaj]

Hi sahib,

First of all, this is NOT a basic question ... regexes are notoriously difficult to get to grips with. If you've got this far on your own as a newbie, then hat's off!

But I'm a little surprised that the function works as you'd expect. Consider the first pattern ...

url [ / url ] (I've put spaces in just so that the forum doesn't parse it as a hyperlink)

... applied to the text ...

[ url ]www.site1.com[ / url ] and [ url ]www.site2.com[ / url ]

In this case the bracketed match will be ...

www.site1.com[ / url ] and [ url ]www.site2.com

... and not what you might expect ...

www.site1.com

This is because the (.*) bit is 'greedy' ... it will find the largest match, not the 'first'.

I would change this to read (in full) ...

/[url]([^[])[\/url]/ where (.) is now ([^[]*).

BTW ([^[]*) will match all chars until it meets a '['.

Secondly, I would understand how each individual match works before trying to apply an array of replacements. Doing seperate preg_replace() 's just takes up a few more lines and is much much easier to debug.

Hope that helps.

Paul 🙂