Question

I created a function which parses text and I would like it to return a full link say:

@tw would return <a href="http://www.twitter.com/tw"></a>

rather it returns http://www.twitter.com/tw with no markup. How can I append the tag to include the text tw, and return the markup to the html?

  String.prototype.parseUsername = function() {
    return this.replace(/[@]+[A-Za-z0-9-_]+/g, function(u) {
        var username = u.replace("@","")
        var twitter_link = document.createElement("a");
        twitter_link.href = "http://www.twitter.com/"+username
        twitter_link.target = "_blank"

        console.log(twitter_link)
        return twitter_link;

    });
  };

Answer 1

Is this what you’re looking for?

String.prototype.parseUsername = function(userName) {
    userName = this.replace(/[@]+[A-Za-z0-9-_]+/g, userName.replace("@", ""));
    return (function(u) {
        var twitter_link = document.createElement("a");
        twitter_link.href = "http://www.twitter.com/"+u
        twitter_link.target = "_blank"

        console.log(twitter_link)
        return twitter_link;

    })(userName);
  };