The Issue
My users can post comments. I want to turn the hidden links within those comments into clickable URLs. I have the following function to do this:
if (!function_exists('create_link'))
{
function create_link($url) {
$pattern = "#((http|https|ftp)://(\S*?\.\S*?))(\s|\;|\)|\]|\[|\{|\}|,|\"|'|:|\<|$|\.\s)#ie";
$link_title = character_limiter(preg_replace($pattern, "$3", $url), 50);
$link = preg_replace($pattern, "'<a href=\"$1\" target=\"_blank\">{LINK_TITLE}</a>$4'", $url);
if ($link == $url)
{
$url = 'http://' . $url;
$link = preg_replace($pattern, "'<a href=\"$1\" target=\"_blank\">{LINK_TITLE}</a>$4'", $url);
}
if ($link != $url)
{
$result = str_replace('{LINK_TITLE}', $link_title, $link);
}
else
{
$result = FALSE;
}
return $result;
}
}
I know that the regex is pretty bad. It kind of works, but makes every single thing with a period into a link, and messes up sometimes with target= portion where it will actually display that.
I've tried a bunch of other regex's but every single one gives me problems, typically like "php unknown modifier ]" or ")" or something.
here's how I call this function when users hit submit in the comment field:
$words = preg_split("/[\s,]+/", $comment);
foreach ($words as $word) {
if ($link = create_link($word))
{
$comment = str_replace($word, $link, $comment);
I just want to convert the right links into links. is something like:
(((ht|f)tp(s?))://)?(www.|[a-zA-Z].)[a-zA-Z0-9-.]+.(com|edu|gov|mil|net|org|biz|info|name|museum|us|ca|uk)(:[0-9]+)(/($|[a-zA-Z0-9.\,\;\?\'\+&%\$#\=~_-]+))$
any better? I don't know, nothing seems to work.
