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

The following should work -

$description = preg_replace("/^(.+?):\s@twitter\s(.+?)$/", "@\\1: \\2", $description);