Question

I have a input form field which collects mixed strings.

Determine if a posted string contains an URL (e.g. http://link.com, link.com, http://www.link.com, etc) so it can then be anchored properly as needed.

An example of this would be something as micro blogging functionality where processing script will anchor anything with a link. Other sample could be this same post where ‘http://link.com’ got anchored automatically.

I believe I should approach this on display and not on input. How could I go about it?

Answer 1

You can use regular expressions to call a function on every match in PHP. You can for example use something like this:

<?php

function makeLink($match) {
    // Parse link.
     $substr = substr($match, 0, 6);
     if ($substr != 'http:/' && $substr != 'https:' && $substr != 'ftp://' && $substr != 'news:/' && $substr != 'file:/') {
        $url = 'http://' . $match;
     } else {
        $url = $match;
     }

     return '<a href="' . $url . '">' . $match . '</a>';
}
function makeHyperlinks($text) {
    // Find links and call the makeLink() function on them.
    return preg_replace('/((www\.|(http|https|ftp|news|file)+\:\/\/)[_.a-z0-9-]+\.[a-z0-9\/_:@=.+?,##%&~-]*[^.|\'|\# |!|\(|?|,| |>|<|;|\)])/e', "makeLink('$1')", $text);
}

?>