Regular expression help...

[Anon]

I have a form that users will use to enter text.

I want to delete all URLs inside the text.

Will the regex below do it?

eregi_replace(https?://(www)?[ \n\r\t]$, "", $text)

eregi does a case-insensitive match

https? matches http or https

(www)? means url has a possible www in it

[ \n\r\t]$ means a space at the end of the url

Is there something I got wrong, or left out entirely?

Thanks.

Richie.

[[deleted]]

A few mistakes:

• the pattern must be in quotes
• a dollar sign means 'end of string', not 'end of pattern'
• By putting the [ \n\r\t] at the end, you will also replace those characters, which is probably not what you want.

Instead, I'd go for preg_replace, which uses PERL-compatible regexps:

$sString ='please visit https://www.phpbuilder.com and stay there';
echo preg_replace("/https?:\/\/(.*?)\s/i", "", $sString);

By the way, are you sure you want remove the URL's, and not just the anchor tags that make the url clickable?

[Anon]

Thanks Vincent. You continue to be a big help to me around here.

I'm building a decent personal ads application, and I don't want people abusing it by using it as a medium for advertising sleazy websites. That's why I prefer to delete all url's.

Richie.