Pulling field from database and maintaining hyperlinks

PHPSardine

Hi -- I'm looking to pull a paragraph into my page from MySQL. Within this paragraph are a few links written in the following form: http//www.phpbuilder.com. How can I make these links clickable on my page? Right now they are just plain text. I imagine that there is a function that handles this, but so far it eludes me...thanks!

Houdini

Could you show the code that is producing the plain text, probably all you need to do is echo <a href ='$yourvar'>$yourvar</a>

tomhath

I don't know of any built-in function. It wouldn't be too hard to write a regular expression to find them and use preg_replace to build the HTML tag. There are some examples of something similar in the comments http://us2.php.net/function.preg_replace

PHPSardine

Thanks for the advice. I understand that when I enter an article into my database, I could just wrap the link in <a href>, but I thought there would be soem sort of function out there that could recognize hyperlinks for me...that's why I asked. Here is an example of coding where I would using it:

$id = $_GET['id'];//get id

$query = "SELECT title, story, DATE_FORMAT(date_add, '%d %M %Y, %l:%i %p') AS da, news_id FROM news WHERE news_id = '$id'";//query to get title, story and date of article refering for $id
	$result = mysql_query($query);
	$row = mysql_fetch_array($result);
	echo "<h1>News Archive</h1>\n
		<h2>{$row['title']}</h2>\n
		<p>".nl2br($row['story'])."</p><br/>\n
		<p class=\"emph\" align=\"right\">{$row['da']}</p>\n";//echo out results
	mysql_free_result($result);

tomhath

PHPSardine wrote:
...but I thought there would be soem sort of function out there that could recognize hyperlinks for me...that's why I asked

Yup. And the name of the function you are looking for is preg_replace.

Look at the bottom of the page I linked to, there are several examples of how to do exactly what you want (search for posts by toxic79_spam, syd_egan, SafireX, tash, adam, and maybe others).

PHPSardine

Thanks tomhath!!! I saw some of those posts and found them to be very effective.