Question

I am looking for a php way to search for a string of text and turn the text within that string to a link.

n being numbers 1-9
Jnn:nn:nn:nn

The link bit would look like this

<a href='http://juno.astroempires.com/map.aspx?loc=Jnn:nn:nn:nn'>Jnn:nn:nn:nn</a>

Hope this makes sense. I know its possible but I don’t know how to do it.

---

This is the final solution I came up with because I integrated into an existing function, thanks for the idea tho bumperbox and the edit Tobiask

function makeClickableLinks($text){
    $text = html_entity_decode($text);
    $text = " ".$text;
    $text = eregi_replace('(((f|ht){1}tp://)[-a-zA-Z0-9@:%_\+.~#?&//=]+)',
            '<a href="\\1" target=_blank>\\1</a>', $text);
    $text = eregi_replace('(((f|ht){1}tps://)[-a-zA-Z0-9@:%_\+.~#?&//=]+)',
            '<a href="\\1" target=_blank>\\1</a>', $text);
    $text = eregi_replace('([[:space:]()[{}])(www.[-a-zA-Z0-9@:%_\+.~#?&//=]+)',
            '\\1<a href="http://\\2" target=_blank>\\2</a>', $text);
    $text = eregi_replace('([_\.0-9a-z-]+@([0-9a-z][0-9a-z-]+\.)+[a-z]{2,3})',
            '<a href="mailto:\\1" target=_blank>\\1</a>', $text);
    $text = eregi_replace('(J[0-9]{2}):([0-9]{2}):([0-9]{2}):([0-9]{2})',
            '<a href="http://juno.astroempires.com/map.aspx?loc=\\1:\\2:\\3:\\4" target=_blank>\\1:\\2:\\3:\\4</a>', $text);
    return $text;
}

This is used in a ajax / mysql chat system. I did have this done by jQuery but its less for the user to do if I just store the links.

Answer 1

look at preg_replace

http://php.net/manual/en/function.preg-replace.php

i haven’t tested this but it should be pretty close

$str = preg_replace("/(J\d{2}:\d{2}:\d{2}:\d{2})/s", "<a href="{$1}">{$1}</a>", $str);

\d matches a digit
{2} means 2 digits

{$1} = everything that was matched inside the first set of ( )