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URL's in PHP strings

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question by Srirangan | Moderate

Hello

I have a large text attributes stored in a Mysql DB after performing the htmlentities( .. , ENT_QUOTES) operation. Now some of these may have Url's in them like "http://.....".

How do I parse this text blob to convert the URL's into working hyperlinks? Thanks!

- Srirangan

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Re: URL's in PHP strings

reply by Anurag

Regular Expressions to the rescue. Use ereg_replace(slower) or preg_replace(faster)

You need to add an anchor tag to every http://... occurence

http://worldwideweb/ becomes <a href="http://worldwideweb/">http://worldwideweb/</a>

This will link upto a whitespace

$goodText = preg_replace('#(http://)([^\s]*)#', '<a href="\\1\\2">\\1\\2</a>', $badText);

$goodText = clickable links
$badText = unclickable links

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Re: URL's in PHP strings

reply by Srirangan

Thanks for the regex code. That works in most cases but not when there is a newline or <br/> tag. Any ideas how to make it work then?

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Re: URL's in PHP strings

answer by Anurag

[^...] means all characters except ...

[^(\s<)] just put all characters you want to exclude in parantheses like (\s<)

So you new format string becomes

#(http://)([^(\s<)]*)#

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Re: URL's in PHP strings

reply by Srirangan

Thanks! That worked perfect. :-)

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Re: URL's in PHP strings

reply by lexxwern

Interesting piece of regex code Anurag. Do you have a link for the docs on regular expressions for PHP?

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Re: URL's in PHP strings

reply by lexxwern

Anurag, please post the relevant link mate. Thanks!

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Re: URL's in PHP strings

reply by lexxwern

Hey, ignore my previous message. I got a good source: http://www.regular-expressions.info

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Re: URL's in PHP strings

reply by Anurag

yeah thats a nice site for regex

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Re: URL's in PHP strings

reply by Srirangan

hey anurag, this regex code get's buggy when the link is followed by a '<' character. any suggestions for that?

- sri

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Re: URL's in PHP strings

reply by VGR

regexp are always buggy to the bones, and they're unreadable, unmaintainable and sluggish.

you shouldn't do an html_entities() as there is no way out (I struggled once in a while with html_entity_decode() just to find it almost unuseable)

Doing simply an addslashes() is enough to store in the DB, and when reading after the stripslashes() you're done and your links do work as expected.

I suggest you add an HTML filter to prevent malicious tags to be embedded, for instance via strip_tags()

I have various "HtmlClean" - like functions for storing in a DB, so if you need one you know where to ask ;-)

bye

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