Preg_Replace Url Issue

[McMaster]

Okay guys,

 

On to my hated regular expressions lol. I'm having a problem here. I've been building a comment system and I want links to be converted to actual clickable URL's. I have this working but only if http:// is within the comment the user has posted.

 

Here is my expression.

 

return preg_replace('!(((f|ht)tp://)[-a-zA-Z?-??-?()0-9@:%_+.~#?&;//=]+)!i', '<a href="$1">$1</a>', $text);

 

Anything I can do here so it accepts both http:// and just www (without http)

 

Thanks in advance

 

ATB

[AyKay47]

http:// is needed in links so that they are external, otherwise they will point internally which is not what we want. What you can do is write another regex that looks for www and replaces it with http://www

[McMaster]

Do you know where I could find a function to do this? I'm really strugglinh here.

[AyKay47]

Here's a simple example for you (untested):

 

$patterns = array('~((?:http|ftp)://(?:www)?\.[^.]+\.(?:com|org|gov))~i', '~(?<!http://)(www)\.([^.]+)\.(com|org|gov)~i');
$replace = array('<a href="$1">$1</a>', '<a href="http://$1.$2.$3">http://$1.$2.$3</a>');
$filtered_string = preg_replace($patterns, $replace, $text);

 

The regex patterns will match 2 situations, the first will match URL's that begin with http:// or ftp:// and may possibly include www.

The second will match URL's that begin with www and are not preceded by http://, it will then add http:// to the beginning of the URL to make it a valid external link.