Update: To prevent any confusion the code highlighter might cause in the post, I added a plain text version of this post here.
I noticed a lot of sites allow user submitted content but prevent autolinking of urls. Some of the most common instances of this are on Twitter sites (much like my own creation: SecretTweet.com). So I threw together a function to autolink urls:
<? $text= 'Hey go to google.com moo http://google.com moo www.google.com moo http://wwww.google.com/404.php moo'; function linkify(&$text) { //CONVERT *://.* TO LINK (EG HTTP://KEVINSMITHDESIGNS.COM) $text = ereg_replace("[a-zA-Z]+://([.]?[a-zA-Z0-9_/-])*", "\\0", $text); //CONVERT *://*.* TO LINK (EG HTTP://WWW.KEVINSMITHDESIGNS.COM) $text = ereg_replace("(^| )(www([.]?[a-zA-Z0-9_/-])*)", "\\1\\2", $text); return $text; } echo linkify($text); ?>
Would return "Hey go to google.com moo http://google.com moo www.google.com moo http://wwww.google.com/404.php moo".
And since I made this primarily for Twitter, the following will linke @ replies automatically, too:
<? $tweet = "Hey @mozunk! Go check out http://digsby.com -- I think you will like it."; function twitterify(&$tweet) { //CONVERT *://.* TO LINK (EG HTTP://KEVINSMITHDESIGNS.COM) $tweet = ereg_replace("[a-zA-Z]+://([.]?[a-zA-Z0-9_/-])*", "\\0", $tweet); //CONVERT *://*.* TO LINK (EG HTTP://WWW.KEVINSMITHDESIGNS.COM) $tweet = ereg_replace("(^| )(www([.]?[a-zA-Z0-9_/-])*)", "\\1\\2", $tweet); //LINK @USERNAME $tweet = preg_replace('/([\.|\,|\:|\¡|\¿|\>|\{|\(]?)@{1}(\w*)([\.|\,|\:|\!|\?|\>|\}|\)]?)\s/i', "$1@$2$3 ", $tweet);return $tweet; } echo twitterify(&$tweet); ?>
Would return "Hey @mozunk! Go check out http://digsby.com -- I think you will like it."
I'll be implementing this into SecretTweet pretty soon. I haven't decided if I want to autolink URLs or not...maybe just @replies.
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automatically link urls php
autolink @ replies Twitter automatically link php
Rob says:
Kevin,
I found your code via Google and I am very interested in using the function to make @replies into links. However neither of them are working on my server. Are there some special requirements? I am currently using Linux with Apache 1.3.41 and PHP 5.2.6.
When I use this code, no links are generated. I did make sure to use the version in your plain text file, instead of the syntax highlighted version. Could you maybe verify that this is working corrently?
Thanks!
Rob says:
Kevin,
If you have a look at the linked forum post above, you can see the code that I used (submitted by MarkRH) to get this working for me.
Thanks