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

Direct answer to your question:

$string = preg_replace('/^(.*?):/', '$1:', $string);

But I assume that you are parsing twitter RSS or something similar. So you can just use /^(\w+)/.