Question

I don’t have much knowledge about regular expression. I found this code to detect link or you can say to insert link that is written in textarea

$url = 'this is just a link http://stackoverflow.com/ to test';
$text = preg_replace("
  #((http|https|ftp)://(\S*?\.\S*?))(\s|\;|\)|\]|\[|\{|\}|,|\"|'|:|\<|$|\.\s)#ie",
  "'<a href=\"$1\" target=\"_blank\">$3</a>$4'",
  $url
);
echo $text;

output:
this is just a link stackoverflow.com to test

But i need to separate the link into a variable from that text area. For example variable
$var = http://stackoverflow.com so that i can work with the link.

Answer 1

You can try in this way:

$text = 'this is just a link http://stackoverflow.com/ to test';
$regex = "/(http|https|ftp|ftps)\:\/\/[a-zA-Z0-9\-\.]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,3}(\/\S*)?/";
if(preg_match($regex, $text, $url)) { // $url is now the array of urls
  // here you should check $url content and length
  echo $url[0]; // the first one in this case
}
else {
  // no urls found
}