Question

I know that this can be done using settings in Outlook, but that only sorts the issue for myself.

What I would like to do is use PHP to prevent text from being hyperlinked just because there is an @ sign etc…

As far as I can see, the only option for me is to encode all @ signs to their HTML numeric entity like so:

Something like this:

$message = str_replace('@','@',$message);

However, if possible, I do not want this to happen if the @ sign is part of an email address.

Therefore I need something like this:

// SOME_REGEX will match any @ sign that is NOT part of an email address
$message = preg_replace('SOME_REGEX','@',$message);

Can anybody think of any other better methods? Are there any flaws in this plan? Can anyone suggest a good regular expression for this? I am struggling to write a regex that matches an @ sign if it is not part of an email address

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

This will not work if the email address is wrapped in anything not defined in the trim list.

$chunked_message = explode(" ", $message);

foreach($chunked_message as $chunk) {
    $clean_chunked_message[] = 
               (!filter_var(trim($chunk, " -().?!\t\r\n", FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL)) 
               ? str_replace('@', '@' $chunk) : $chunk;
}

$clean_message = implode(" ", $clean_chunked_message);

Good luck.