Question

i need to make my users aware that they are clicking an external link. I have many sorts of chats on my website and sometimes users post links, these links could be dangerous for them so i wanted to warn them before leaving the site.

For example eveonline.com uses the following on their forums: http://www.eveonline.com/externalLink.aspx?l=http://altdevblogaday.com/2011/07/11/the-hidden-evil-of-the-micro-transaction/

whenever a link shows up they see if the domain is different than eveonline.com and if it is they add the “http://www.eveonline.com/externalLink.aspx?l=” to it.

This is my makeClickableLinks function, i use it to make links clickable, i was wondering if someone could rewrite if for me to do the above + clickable as i didnt write this function since i am clueless with preg_match.

function makeClickableLinks($text)
    {
    $text = eregi_replace('(((f|ht){1}tp://)[-a-zA-Z0-9@:%_\+.~#?&//=]+)','<a target="_blank" href="\\1">\\1</a>', $text);

    $text = eregi_replace('([[:space:]()[{}])(www.[-a-zA-Z0-9@:%_\+.~#?&//=]+)','\\1<a target="_blank" href="http://\\2">\\2</a>', $text);


    return $text;
    }

the variable $text is the post of the user.

Answer 1

I’m no PHP wizard, but give this a try. Note that almost all of this is taken straight out of the PHP manual here.

function makeClickableLinks($text)
{
    $text = eregi_replace('(((f|ht){1}tp://)[-a-zA-Z0-9@:%_\+.~#?&//=]+)',
                          '<a target="_blank" href="\\1">\\1</a>', $text);      

    $text = eregi_replace('([[:space:]()[{}])(www.[-a-zA-Z0-9@:%_\+.~#?&//=]+)',
                          '\\1<a target="_blank" href="http://\\2">\\2</a>', 
                          $text);

    $regex = '@(<a.*?href=")((?!(?:(?:f|ht)tps?://)?(?:[a-z0-9]+\.)?domain\.com)[^"]*)@i';
    $replacement = '$1http://your.domain.com/externLink.php?l=$2';

    $text = preg_replace($regex, $replacement, $text);

    return $text;
}