Question

If I have a paragraph with contains plain URLs (without the anchors). How can I wrap those URLs within a tags?

For example:

$string = "visit http://blabla.com to get something";

So how could I make that as:

visit <a href="http://blabla.com">http://blabla.com</a> to get something

Thanks!

Answer 1

$str = "so i found this sweet website, http://www.stackoverflow.com you should check it out";

$modified = preg_replace("@(https?://([-\w\.]+)+(:\d+)?(/([\w/_\.]*(\?\S+)?)?)?)@", "<a href='$1' target='_blank'>$1</a>", $str);

echo $modified;

Or in a function

function linkUrls($str) {
    return preg_replace("@(https?://([-\w\.]+)+(:\d+)?(/([\w/_\.]*(\?\S+)?)?)?)@", "<a href='$1' target='_blank'>$1</a>", $str);
}
$str = "blah blah http://www.stackoverflow.com jaejg";
echo linkUrls($str);

You can ignore the $1 . It is assigned to the text matched by the regular expression. In this case, the URL.