Twitter @ replies and emails

[GRMrGecko]

Hello, I'm trying to figure out how to tell the difference between an email and a @username using perg_replace.

 

My current code is

$text = preg_replace("/(\\S+@\\S+\\.\\w+)/i", "<a href=\"mailto:$1\">$1</a>", $text);
$text = preg_replace("/@([A-Za-z0-9_]+)/i", "@<a href=\"http://twitter.com/$1\" target=\"_blank\">$1</a>", $text);

 

This doesn't work when there is actually an email as it thinks the email is the username.

Any help?

 

Thanks,

Mr. Gecko

[mrdamien]

Edit: Since I'm not that great with regular expressions, and don't want to spend very long testing... heres a less-regex idea.

 

Untested:

preg_match( '/([.]{1,255}@([.]{1,255})/', $text, $matches);

foreach($matches as $match)
{
     if(filter_var($match, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL)){
          $text = str_replace($match, "<a href=\"mailto:$match\">$match</a>", $text);
     }else{
          $text = str_replace($match, @<a href=\"http://twitter.com/$match\" target=\"_blank\">$match</a>", $text);
     }
}

Find all strings resembling "@(characters)".

Use PHPs function to determine if its an email.

If not an email, its a twitter account.

 

I don't know if twitter has username restrictions (Like not symbols) if so, you'll probably want to test for those again, in the else clause.

[thebadbad]

Edited your patterns a bit:

 

$text = preg_replace('~\S+@\S+\.[a-z]+~i', '<a href="mailto:$0">$0</a>', $text);
$text = preg_replace('~(^|\s)@([a-z0-9_]+)~i', '$1@<a href="http://twitter.com/$2" target="_blank">$2</a>', $text);

The email one being this simple will also convert invalid emails, but it should at least work properly now.

[GRMrGecko]

Edited your patterns a bit:

 

$text = preg_replace('~\S+@\S+\.[a-z]+~i', '<a href="mailto:$0">$0</a>', $text);
$text = preg_replace('~(^|\s)@([a-z0-9_]+)~i', '$1@<a href="http://twitter.com/$2" target="_blank">$2</a>', $text);

The email one being this simple will also convert invalid emails, but it should at least work properly now.

 

So why do you use ~ for that? As you can tell, I'm pretty new to regular expression.

[thebadbad]

Those are just the pattern delimiters of my preference. They can be any non-white space, non-alphanumeric ASCII character (except a backslash). And it's always smart to use delimiters that don't appear within the pattern, so you don't have to escape them, hence my use of the 'odd' tildes (I have yet to write a pattern matching a tilde). When you're using forward slashes as pattern delimiters, you would have to escape any forward slashes inside the pattern - something that occurs quite often.