Transform String URL to HTMl URL

Howdy,

Today i have interesting and simple PHP tutorial, How to transform string url to html url and i mean how to transform

This -> http://www.something.tld  — into this -> http://www.something.tld

it’s very simple using preg_replace function … But actually i find the whole regular expression functions hard to understand and really it’s not human readable…

So let’s start,

<?
class URL_Detector{

	private $URL;

	public function Detect($string){

		$Replace = preg_replace("/(http:\/\/[^\s]+)/i", "<a href=\"$1\">$1</a>", $string);

		$this->URL = $Replace;

		return $this->URL;

	}

}
?>

As you can see i’m using classes to make the detector because classes are very flexible, So let me explain what’s happening up there .

Inside the preg_replace function  i’m using this —   /(http:\/\/[^\s]+)/i   –  as the pattern  and this  just looking for urls starting by http:// so you can’t detect url starting with www .

Then i’m using this –   <a href=\”$1\”>$1</a>   — as the replacement, but you could ask yourself what does $1 mean?

So $1 refer to the words or the sentence which we want to find and replace and it called reference, and it been there since PHP 4.0.4 , you can replace $ with \\ so we can write it like this –   <a href=\”\\1\”>\\1</a>   — and it will still work.

Now let’s back to our class,

Let’s test it:

<?
$URL = new URL_Detector();

$Text = 'I have 2 websites http://www.zingyso.com/ And http://sru.me and http://www.zingyso.com/b is my blog';

echo $URL->Detect($Text);
?>

The code above should return:
I have 2 websites http://www.zingyso.com/ And http://sru.me and http://www.zingyso.com/b is my blog

—-

And that’s it, now you have String to URL Transformer…

Hope you enjoyed and have a nice day