php html create link from text

Question

I found a routine to create a html link when a link is found in a text

Answer 1

The characters ?=& are for urls with query strings. Notice that I changed the separator from / to ! because there a lot of slashes in your expression. Also note that you don't need A-Z if you are in case-insensitive mode.

return preg_replace('!(http://[a-z0-9_./?=&-]+)!i', '<a href="$1">$1</a> ', $text." ");

Answer 2

Without RegEx:

<?php
    // take a string and turn any valid URLs into HTML links
    function makelink($input) {
        $parse = explode(' ', $input);
        foreach ($parse as $token) {
            if (parse_url($token, PHP_URL_SCHEME)) {
                echo '<a href="' . $token . '">' . $token . '</a>' . PHP_EOL;
            }
        }
    }

    // sample data
    $data = array(
        'test one http://www.mysite.com/',
        'http://www.mysite.com/page1.html test two http://www.mysite.com/page2.html',
        'http://www.mysite.com/?go=page test three',
        'https://www.mysite.com:8080/?go=page&test=four',
        'http://www.mysite.com/?redir=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mysite.com%2Ftest%2Ffive',
        'ftp://test:six@ftp.mysite.com:21/pub/',
        'gopher://mysite.com/test/seven'
    );

    // test our sample data
    foreach ($data as $text) {
        makelink($text);
    }
?>

Output:

<a href="http://www.mysite.com/">http://www.mysite.com/</a>
<a href="http://www.mysite.com/page1.html">http://www.mysite.com/page1.html</a>
<a href="http://www.mysite.com/page2.html">http://www.mysite.com/page2.html</a>
<a href="http://www.mysite.com/?go=page">http://www.mysite.com/?go=page</a>
<a href="https://www.mysite.com:8080/?go=page&test=four">https://www.mysite.com:8080/?go=page&test=four</a>
<a href="http://www.mysite.com/?redir=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mysite.com%2Ftest%2Ffive">http://www.mysite.com/?redir=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mysite.com%2Ftest%2Ffive</a>
<a href="ftp://test:six@ftp.mysite.com:21/pub/">ftp://test:six@ftp.mysite.com:21/pub/</a>
<a href="gopher://mysite.com/test/seven">gopher://mysite.com/test/seven</a>

Answer 3

Your regex should include forward slashes in its character class for the end of the url:

/(http\:\/\/[a-zA-Z0-9_\-\.\/]*?) /i

That ought to do it.