Detect URL's in string text

kbc1

Hi all

Through a CMS I allow a user to type in address details of shops and they sometimes provide a web address and publish this to the website. I would like to know how I could convert any web address in the string text to become an active hyperlink. Web addresses could be any of the following formats:

www.mydomain.com
www.mydomain.eu
www.mydomain.test.co.uk

The web address will always start with www. (not http)
The web address may have mutiple full stops as it could be a sub domain

Can someone maybe help me? I assume this wil be a regular expression of some kind but its beyond my scope of PHP knowledge on how to write that kind of function at the moment!

Thanks for reading
K

ixalmida

It doesn't need to be a regular expression. I try to avoid them for simple string functions.

$words = explode(" ", $input_str);
$count = count($words);

for($x = 0; $x < $count; $x++)
  {
  if(strpos($words[$x], "www."))
    {
    $words[$x] = "<a href='".$words[$x]."'>".$words[$x]."</a>";
    }
  }

$output_str = implode(" ", $words);

I chose strpos() here because it is relatively fast compared to many other string functions. Also note, I added the braces for readability but none are required.

kbc1

Hi ixalmida

That kind of works (almost) but some of my text might have new lines or character returns in them.

So where I have the following text (for example), my link is at the end of line three but it contonues onto the start of line 4 (in bold)

Line one with no link
Line two with no link
Line three with a link
Line Four with no link

I think its because the explode() is on a non breaking space. how would I get round this problem?

Many Thanks