PHP: Wrap links from string between <a> </a> tags [duplicate]

Question

This question already has answers here:

Replace URLs in text with HTML links (17 answers)

Closed 8 years ago.

I have this PHP code:

$y = $_POST['message'];

$pre = htmlspecialchars($y, ENT_QUOTES);

$msg = str_replace("&lt;br&gt;", "<br>", $pre);

That replaces all the converted <br>'s (&lt;b&gt;) back to <br>. And I am trying to do the same (well, almost) with all the links, somewhat like in the forums. Example...

http://www.example.com

Should be wrapped around like this:

<a href="http://www.example.com">http://www.example.com</a>

IF it's easier, I would obviously prefer the [URL] [/URL] method, likewise, [IMG] [/IMG].

Could someone point me in the right direction? I have been looking for hours here, and nothing adjusts to my need :/

Answer 1

A VERY simple way of doing it:

$input = '[URL]xxx[/URL]';

$url = explode('[URL]', $input);
$url = explode('[/URL]', $url[1]);
$url = '<a href="' . $url[0] . '"/>Link</a>';

echo $url;

There are most certainly better ways of doing this. Maybe with regex or preg_replace.

Answer 2

This is usually done with regular expressions, where you can google link regex and you'll be given a bunch of examples and tutorials. However if $_POST['message'] isn't a huge string and doesn't contain a LOT of links you can actually explode on [URL] and then find [/URL] in the array result of explode() and calculate the link length. From there you just need to append the anchor tag and substr the link as you already know the length from the original array element.