Question

I’m producing HTML from twitter search results. Happily using the Net::Twitter module 🙂

One of the rules in Twitter is that all-numeric hashtags are not links.
This allows to unambiguously tweet things like “ur not my #1 anymore”, as in here: http://twitter.com/natarias2007/status/11246320622

The solution I came up with looks like:

$tweet =~ s{#([0-9]*[A-Za-z_]+[0-9]*)}{<a href="http://twitter.com/search?q=%23$1">#$1</a>}g;

It seems to work (let’s hope), but I’m still curious… how would you do it?

EDIT: that regex i came up earlier was not correct!
see below for a better answer 🙂

Answer 1

Your regexp wouldn’t capture anchors that contain more than one letter separated by numbers, e.g. #a0a:

my @anchors = ($tweet =~ m/#(\w+)/g);
foreach my $anchor (@anchors)
{
    next unless $anchor =~ m/[a-z]/i;
    $tweet =~ s{#$anchor}{<a href="http://twitter.com/search?q=%23$anchor">#$anchor</a>}g;
}

e.g. consider my $tweet = "hello #123 hello #abc1a hello #a0a";

Your code produces hello #123 hello <a href="http://twitter.com/search?q=%23abc1">#abc1</a>a hello <a href="http://twitter.com/search?q=%23a9">#a0</a>a

and mine produces hello #123 hello <a href="http://twitter.com/search?q=%23abc1a">#abc1a</a> hello <a href="http://twitter.com/search?q=%23a9a">#a0a</a>