Question

In PHP, I want to make it so that if a user types:

[LINK] url [/LINK]

It will replace it with the anchor tag:

<a href=url>url</a>

How would I show this? I’m not sure how to translate this into regex…

I’ve tried the following:

[LINK][a-zA-Z0-9_-.]+[/LINK]

But obviously that isn’t right 🙁

Answer 1

$str = '[LINK]http://google.com[/LINK]';
$str = preg_replace('/\[link\]([^\[\]]+)\[\/link\]/i', '<a href="$1">$1</a>', $str);

echo $str; // <a href="http://google.com">http://google.com</a>

Explanation:

\[link\]    Match "[LINK]"
([^\[\]]+)  Match any character except "[" and "]"
\[\/link\]  Match "[/LINK]"
i           Make it case-insensitive