Regular Expression Problem

[bailo81]

Hello!

I've been trying to replace inbound links with outbound links.

For example, I would like to replace

<a href="www.google.com">www.google.com</a>

with

<a href="www.google.com" onclick="target='_blank'">www.google.com</a>

whilst ignoring any mailto: links.

I have tried the following:

$s = '<a href="http://www.google.com">www.google.com</a> <a href="http://www.google.com">www.google.com</a>';

$pattern = '(<a href="http://[^"]+".*)>([^<]+</a>.*)';
$replacement = '\\1 onclick="target=\'_blank\'">\\2';

$text =  ereg_replace($pattern, $replacement, $s);

Now with just one link in the text this works, however it fails with two and only amends the last link in the string.

So I figured I needed a function:

	function outboundLinks($text) {

	$pattern = '(<a href="http://[^"]+".*)">([^<]+</a>.*)';
	$replacement = '\\1 onclick="target=\'_blank\'">\\2';

	while (ereg('<a href="[^"]+">[^<]+</a>', $text) != FALSE) {

		$text =  ereg_replace($pattern, $replacement, $text);


	}

	return $text;

}

However this function just loops through and adds the onclick="target='_blank'" repeatedly to the last link, over and over again until the browser crashes or the server goes up in smoke :evilgrin:

Now I have very limited knowledge of regular expressions so i'm guessing thats where i'm falling down but any advice would be very much appreciated.

Thanks

[NogDog]

I'd probably do:

$text = preg_replace('#(<a\s[^>]*href=["\']http://[^>]+)>#', "$1 target=\"+blank\">", $text);

[bailo81]

Looks good man 🙂

Thanks!

[bailo81]

I've just discovered that if there are two links in the text and one already is an external link then it adds another target="_blank" to the link.

[NogDog]

That probably does not hurt anything, other than adding a few extra characters to the output.