Question

I use this function to make links clickable:

function clickable($text) {
   $text = preg_replace("/(https?|ftps?|mailto):\/\/([-\w\p{L}\.]+)+(:\d+)?(\/([\w\p{L}#-;+-\/_\.]*(\?\S+)?)?)?/u", '<a target="_blank" href="$0">$0</a>', $text);
   return $text;
}

It works fine but there is one little problem. If the $text variable contains a string like this:

http://example.com

some text

i.e. link, line break(s) and some text, I get incorrect result. Instead of this:

<a target="_blank" href="http://example.com">http://example.com</a>

it becomes:

<a target="_blank" href="http://example.com<br">http://example.com</a>
/>

some text

Here is how I display text on my site:

<?php echo clickable(nl2br($db['content'])); ?>

nl2br function converts all line breaks into html <br /> tags but this function thinks it should keep this tag in url…

Hope I’m clear 🙂

Any ideas?

Answer 1

At the end of your pattern you have \S+ – this allows all non-space characters, including <, and the reason your regex doesn’t work as expected. I’m not quite sure what is the role of that part, consider removing the (\?\S+)? and see if it’s working for you.

Another option is changing that group to: [^\s<]* – this will not capture spaces and the < sign, solving exactly this problem…