Question

Okay so I am horrible with regular expressions and need some help here. I’ve found this code to match a twitter username:

'/(?<=^|\s)@([a-z0-9_]+)/i

This works in most cases, except when a HTML tag is placed before the @username, example:

<p>@username</p>

That’s a problem for me since it will happen with what I’m doing.

Then there is this, which works, but also detects email addresses, which isn’t what I want:

/^[A-Za-z0-9_]+$/

Any ideas?

Answer 1

If the html tag ending > is the problem, add it to your lookbehind group:

'/(?<=^|\s|>)@([a-z0-9_]+)/i