PHP: How to use the Twitter API's data to convert URLs, mentions, and hastags in tweets to links?

Question

I\'m really stumped on how Twitter expects users of its API to convert the plaintext tweets it sends to properly linked HTML.

Here\'s the deal: Twitter\'s JSON API sends

Answer 1

Jeff's solution worked well with English text but it got broken when the tweet contained non-ASCII characters. This solution avoids that problem:

mb_internal_encoding("UTF-8");

// Return hyperlinked tweet text from json_decoded status object:
function MakeStatusLinks($status) 
{$TextLength=mb_strlen($status['text']); // Number of UTF-8 characters in plain tweet.
 for ($i=0;$i<$TextLength;$i++)
 {$ch=mb_substr($status['text'],$i,1); if ($ch<>"\n") $ChAr[]=$ch; else $ChAr[]="\n
"; // Keep new lines in HTML tweet.
 }
if (isset($status['entities']['user_mentions']))
 foreach ($status['entities']['user_mentions'] as $entity)
 {$ChAr[$entity['indices'][0]] = "".$ChAr[$entity['indices'][0]];
  $ChAr[$entity['indices'][1]-1].="";
 }
if (isset($status['entities']['hashtags']))
 foreach ($status['entities']['hashtags'] as $entity)
 {$ChAr[$entity['indices'][0]] = "".$ChAr[$entity['indices'][0]];
  $ChAr[$entity['indices'][1]-1] .= "";
 }
if (isset($status['entities']['urls']))
 foreach ($status['entities']['urls'] as $entity)
 {$ChAr[$entity['indices'][0]] = "".$entity['display_url']."";
  for ($i=$entity['indices'][0]+1;$i<$entity['indices'][1];$i++) $ChAr[$i]='';
 }
if (isset($status['entities']['media']))
 foreach ($status['entities']['media'] as $entity)
 {$ChAr[$entity['indices'][0]] = "".$entity['display_url']."";
  for ($i=$entity['indices'][0]+1;$i<$entity['indices'][1];$i++) $ChAr[$i]='';
 }
return implode('', $ChAr); // HTML tweet.
}