PHP Regex to convert text before colon to link

Question

I need to find the first occurance of a colon \':\' and take the complete string before that and append it to a link.

e.g.

username: @twitter nice site!          


        

Answer 1

I'd use string manipulation for this, rather than regex, using strstr, substr and strlen:

$username = strstr($description, ':', true);
$description = '' . $username . ''
             . substr($description, strlen($username));