[RESOLVED] Regex Auto Linking

[Shawazi]

I want all http://www.blah.com/ and www.blah.com to turn into <a> tag links. The tricky part is that a place on my site allows <a> tags to be entered as well as http:// text so the REGEX I am using now will convert the URL inside the tag.

I have :

$pattern = '/((http:\/\/|[^\/]*www\.)[^<" ]+)/';

I tried many options but it would always make one work but not the other. For instance I tried out ^["\']*? at the start, but it would not convert anything that wasn't at the start. I am horrible with understanding lookbacks but I think that's what I need to use.

[Shawazi]

This is the solution I came up with after much cursing. If anyone has a better way feel free to post it.

$pattern = '/(?:\A|\s)(?:[^"\'\s\n\r]*)((http:\/\/|[^"\'\s\n\r\/]*www\.)[^<"\r\n ]+)/';
$text = preg_replace_callback($pattern, 'urlConcat', $text);