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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-12T22:39:08+00:00

I want to do THIS , just a little bit more complicated: Lets say,

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I want to do THIS, just a little bit more complicated:

Lets say, I have an HTML input:

<a href="http://www.example.com" title="Bla @test blubb">Don't break!</a>
Some Twitter Users: @codinghorror, @spolsky, @jarrod_dixon and @blam4c.
You can't reach me at blam4c@example.com.

Is there a good RegEx to replace the twitter username mentions by links to twitter, but leave @example (eMail-Adress at the bottom) AND @test (in the link title, i.e. in HTML tags)?

It probably should also try to not add links inside existing links, i.e. not break this:

<a href="http://www.example.com">Hello @someone there!</a>

My current attempt is to add “>” at the beginning of the string, then use this RegEx:

Search:  '/>([^<]*\s)\@([a-z0-9_]+)([\s,.!?])/i'
Replace: '>\1<a href="http://twitter.com/\2">@\2</a>\3'

Then remove the “>” I added in step 1.

But that won’t match anything but the “@blam4c”. I know WHY it does so, that’s not the problem.

I would like to find a solution that finds and replaces all twitter user name mentions without destroying the HTML. Maybe it might even be better to code this without RegEx?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    First, keep the angle brackets out of your regexps.

    Use a HTML parser and xpath to select the text nodes you are interested in processing, then consider a regexp for matching only @refs in those nodes.

    I’ll let to other people to try and give a specific answer to the regex part.

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