Question

This is a followup from another post at here.

Problem: The code below works good with the exception of strings that contain double quotes which will render strange characters

Sample string:

“Walter Isaacson http://t.co/vaLxVduA”

Rendered as:

“Walter Isaacson http://t.co/vaLxVduA���

t.co/vaLxVduA���

I believe the problem is in the regex. What could I try to make this work?

Code:

function makeLink($match) {
    // Parse link.
     $substr = substr($match, 0, 6);
     if ($substr != 'http:/' && $substr != 'https:' && $substr != 'ftp://' && $substr != 'news:/' && $substr != 'file:/') {
        $url = 'http://' . $match;
     } else {
        $url = $match;
     }

     return '<a href="' . $url . '">' . $match . '</a>';
}
function makeHyperlinks($text) {
    // Find links and call the makeLink() function on them.
    return preg_replace('/((www\.|http|https|ftp|news|file):\/\/[\w.-]+\.[\w\/:@=.+?,#%&~-]*[^.\'# !(?,><;\)])/e', "makeLink('$1')", $text);
}

Answer 1

The problem is die unicode character ”. When you add the u modifier, to treat every string as UTF-8, it works, but also catches the quote as part of the URL. You would need to exclude this quote also:

preg_replace('/((www\.|http|https|ftp|news|file):\/\/[\w.-]+\.[\w\/:@=.+?,#%&~-]*[^.\'# !(?,>”<;\)])/eu', "makeLink('$1')", $text);

But your regex looks kinda huge, I did a quick search for a URL regex and found this one, it seems to work also, and don’t need all the exclusions

preg_replace('@(https?://([-\w\.]+)+(:\d+)?(/([\w/_\.]*(\?\S+)?)?)?)@eu', "makeLink('$1')", $text);