Question

Okay, the header question may sound confusing, yeah, I too was confused. Anyway, what I wanted is this:
Say I have this line of text,

The quick brown @fox jumps @over the @lazy dog.

This line of text is a dynamically fetched ‘single line’ from the database, not an array of texts. Assuming the texts with first letter as ‘@’ are links to a page or something, I want that I can specify on where to put my anchor tag, in my case, I want to put anchor tag on each of the texts starting with ‘@’.

I tried explode, but it seems explode is not the answer to this. Can someone help me out here? Thanks.

Answer 1

You don’t want to use explode for that, but a regex. To match multiple occurences, preg_match_all is the deal.

preg_match_all('/@\w+/', $input, $matches);

        #        @   is the literal "@" character
        #    and \w+ matches consecutive letters

You certainy might want to use preg_replace to transform them into links. Or better yet preg_replace_callback to move some logic into a handler function.