Question

I have a form that submits and displays text. Entering http://www.twitter.com for example displays in clear text. How can i get it to automatically display as a clickable link?

I am working with MySQL and PHP.

Answer 1

You propably want your script to automatically detect links…I did that a few weeks ago on a script that pulls tweets from an RSS Feed…this is the code. You can replace $_POST[‘inputfield’] with the appropriate variable!

if (preg_match('/www./',$_POST['inputfield'])) //checks if there's www. in the field. alternatively use http: instead of www.
{
$link_start_pos = strpos($_POST['inputfield'],'www.'); //returns the link-start-pos, alternatively use http: instead of www. 

    // find the end of the link
if($link_end_pos = strpos($_POST['inputfield'], ' ', $link_start_pos) === false) 
    { //if theres no space after the link, it's propably on the end of the text
        $link_end_pos = strlen($_POST['inputfield']); 
    }
    // form a string with the actual link in it
$link = substr($_POST['inputfield'],$link_start_pos,$link_end_pos);
    // and make it clickable
$link_insert = '<a href="'.$link.'" target="_blank">'.$link.'</a>';
}

Hope that helps