Question

I’ve created this regex

(www|http://)[^ ]+

that match every http://… or www…. but I dont know how to make preg_replace that would work, I’ve tried

preg_replace('/((www|http://)[^ ]+)/', '<a href="\1">\1</a>', $str);

but it doesn’t work, the result is empty string.

Answer 1

You need to escape the slashes in the regex because you are using slashes as the delimiter. You could also use another symbol as the delimiter.

// escaped
preg_replace('/((www|http:\/\/)[^ ]+)/', '<a href="\1">\1</a>', $str);

// another delimiter, '@'
preg_replace('@((www|http://)[^ ]+)@', '<a href="\1">\1</a>', $str);