Question

I made a bbCode replacer and I got stucked with the linking.

$replacements[3] = '<a href="\1">\2</a>';

It replaces in no time, but with wrong URL… mydomain.com http:\\somelink.com\
What’s wrong with this one?

Answer 1

You haven’t actually shown the regex to match it.. but it should be something like:

Find

"'\[url=(.*?)\](.*?)\[/url\]'i"

Replace

"<a href=\"\\1\">\\2</a>"

Example

preg_replace("'\[url=(.*?)\](.*?)\[/url\]'i", 
             "<a href=\"\\1\">\\2</a>", 
             "[url=www.google.com]Google![/url]"
             );

Output

<a href="www.google.com">Google!</a>

Note
I purposely don’t validate the URL in the regex because it’s ugly and not necessary. Validate it using filter_var(..., FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL);