Question

I have a website were users enters articles and their reference(like wikipedia). The reference which were saved in the database includes both web address and non web addresses.Currently i am hyper linking the script using google’s search?q and its working properly.

     echo("<br><a rel=nofollow  target=_blank href='http://www.google.com/search?q=".urlencode($row['ref'])."' class=art>$row[ref]</a>");

i want to know whether its possible to automatically detect my reference as a web address or not .if it is a web address then when users click to the hyperlink it goes directly to that website and if not it should hyperlink to google search.

eg:

if user enters this link as reference.hyper link should be to this web address

      http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/capitals
      or
      www.washingtonpost.com/sports/capitals
      or
      washingtonpost.com/sports/capitals

or if the user enters reference as below

     washingtonpost+sports+capitals

it should go to googles search?q

advance thanks for your help

Answer 1

You would use a regular expresion to see if it is a link and make it a link. Regular expression also makes sure it is valid syntax for a link.

 $reg_exUrl = "/(http|https|ftp|ftps)\:\/\/[a-zA-Z0-9\-\.]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,3}(\/\S*)?/";
 // The Text you want to filter for urls
 $text = "http://www.google.com"; #The text you want to filter goes here
 // Check if there is a url in the text
 if(preg_match($reg_exUrl, $text, $url)) {
   // make the urls hyper links
   echo preg_replace($reg_exUrl, "<a href="{$url[0]}">{$url[0]}</a> ", $text);
 } else {
   // if no urls in the text just return the text
   echo '<a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=',urlencode($text),'">',$text,'</a>';
 }