Remove URLs from text string

Question

Is it possible to search for and remove URLs from a string in PHP. Talking about the actual text here not the HTML. Example to remove:

mywebsite.com
http://myweb         


        

Answer 1

You can easily use a regex to find the URLs, then specify what to replace them with using PHP's function preg_replace.

http://daringfireball.net/2010/07/improved_regex_for_matching_urls

Edit: Since this is user submitted data, you might want to do some validation before you store the "description" field, and check to see if it contains a URL. If it does, you can prevent the user from saving the form.

For this, you can use preg_match, while still using a regex to find a URL.