[RESOLVED] make url's into links (and back again)

ekitel

I'm looking for a function that will convert the URL's in a sting into html hyperlinks

I've found a few, but none of them work for me, commonly I get this kind of error:

Parse error: parse error, unexpected T_LNUMBER in /home/.ilya/kittell/ekittell.com/php/VSCMS/index.php on line 45

I would also like to find something that converts html hyperlinks to simple URL's, this should be easier

in the mean time I'll be reading this tutorial to see if I can figure out how to write the functions myself http://weblogtoolscollection.com/regex/regex.php

thanks in advance

ekitel

as usual I figured it out myself b4 getting any responses, probably better that way, I know alot more about regex now than when I started the thread (which was nothing)

here's what I got, feedback greatly appreciated!
(edit note: new and improved version)

<?php
function makeLink ($str){
$target = "_blank";
$str =  preg_replace("/[^(http:\/\/)]w{3}\./i", "http://www.", $str);
return  preg_replace("/(http|ftp):\/\/(\S+\.[a-z]{2,3}\S*)/i", " <a href='$0' target='" . $target . "'>$2</a>", $str);
}

echo makeLink("here's a link http://www.google.com/index.html and another one www.yahoo.com ... nice!");
?>

bradgrafelman

Glad to hear you figured it out on the own. Yes, 'tis indeed "probably better that way" - shows you're learning 😉

Don't forget to mark this thread resolved if you've found that it's working now.

ekitel

bradgrafelman wrote:
Glad to hear you figured it out on the own. Yes, 'tis indeed "probably better that way" - shows you're learning 😉

Don't forget to mark this thread resolved if you've found that it's working now.

I'm still working on the function that replaces html hyperlink with simple URL, harder than I thought, can't figure out how to tell the pattern to end with the next <\/a> instead of skipping to the very last <\/a> in the string

bradgrafelman

What's your pattern look like? I suspect you're doing something like "(.)" in between the quotes in the HTML tag. You might need to make that expression non-greedy, by adding a question mark (i.e. "(.?)").

ekitel

bradgrafelman wrote:
What's your pattern look like? I suspect you're doing something like "(.)" in between the quotes in the HTML tag. You might need to make that expression non-greedy, by adding a question mark (i.e. "(.?)").

I figured I would first erase the link that displays in the html page since I don't need it at all and then extracting the url from the href later

like this works pretty well if the link that's displayed has no whitespaces

$str =  preg_replace("/>\S+<\/a>/i", ">", $str);

but often there are whitespaces in the link like "<a href="google.com">go to google</a>" so I tried this, but it causes the problem I mentioned

$str =  preg_replace("/>.+<\/a>/i", ">", $str);

as per your suggestion I changed to this and now it works the way I expect

$str =  preg_replace("/>.+?<\/a>/i", ">", $str);

seems that I haven't studied the whole ungreedy concept enough yet, thanks for your help! when I get the URL extracted then I'll post all the code here and mark it resolved

bradgrafelman

As explained on this page, you can also use the "ungreedy" modifier U (a capital 'u') to force all */+'s to be ungreedy in a pattern instead of adding a question mark after all of them.

ekitel

OK here's what I got to extract URLs from HTML href links

<?php
function unMakeLink ($str){
return  preg_replace("/<.*a href=('|\")(\S+)('|\").*>.+<\/a>/iU", "$2", $str);
}

echo unMakeLink("here's a link  <a href='http://www.google.com/index.html' target='_blank'>google search here</a> and another one <class='link' a href='http://www.yahoo.com' target='_blank'>www.yahoo.com</a> ... nice!");
?>

thanks again!