Shortening URL's using PHP

[Dariusz]

I have a guestbook on one of my sites where the entires are formatted to be
x pixles in width. Now the text is input and output from a "blob" field
from a database... but when people input long URL's into their entries, the
formatting of the page is ruined.

Can anyone suggest a way for PHP to "read through" the text and substitute
a URL with a short text link, but still keeping the URL so it's clickable?
From my observations, the URL's may or may not (usually not) have the
prefix http://.

All I can think of is for PHP to count how many consecutive characters
there are before a "space" character, and substitute if it's over x
characters in length. But I don't know if this is possible.

Would prefer suggestions how to do it rather than actual code (I want some
challenge after all).

Thanks.

Dariusz

[usenet]

On Tue, 22 Mar 2005 08:58:07 GMT, [e-mail] (Dariusz) wrote:

Can anyone suggest a way for PHP to "read through" the text and substitute
a URL with a short text link, but still keeping the URL so it's clickable?

This doesn't address your consideration about shortening based on location of
spaces, but it shortens URLs that are more than 50 chars in length and appends
ellipses :

echo "<a href=\"" . $url . "\">" . substr($url, 0, 50);

if (strlen($url) > 50) {
echo "&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.";
}

echo "</a>";
HTH

[Joe Webster]

Dariusz wrote:

I have a guestbook on one of my sites where the entires are formatted to be
x pixles in width. Now the text is input and output from a "blob" field
from a database... but when people input long URL's into their entries, the
formatting of the page is ruined.

Can anyone suggest a way for PHP to "read through" the text and substitute
a URL with a short text link, but still keeping the URL so it's clickable?
From my observations, the URL's may or may not (usually not) have the
prefix http://.

All I can think of is for PHP to count how many consecutive characters
there are before a "space" character, and substitute if it's over x
characters in length. But I don't know if this is possible.

Would prefer suggestions how to do it rather than actual code (I want some
challenge after all).

Thanks.

Dariusz

A perfect use for a regular expression.

-Joe

[Nik Coughin]

Dariusz wrote:

I have a guestbook on one of my sites where the entires are formatted
to be x pixles in width. Now the text is input and output from a
"blob" field from a database... but when people input long URL's into
their entries, the formatting of the page is ruined.

Can anyone suggest a way for PHP to "read through" the text and
substitute a URL with a short text link, but still keeping the URL so
it's clickable? From my observations, the URL's may or may not
(usually not) have the prefix http://.

All I can think of is for PHP to count how many consecutive characters
there are before a "space" character, and substitute if it's over x
characters in length. But I don't know if this is possible.

Would prefer suggestions how to do it rather than actual code (I want
some challenge after all).

Thanks.

Dariusz

Have a look at this:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.preg-replace.php

Read the comment by syd_egan. Now, I know you didn't want actual code, but
there are several challenges here, one of them is that syd_egan's code
presumes that either the http:// or ftp:// schemes are present, so there is
your first challenge. Good luck.

[Dariusz]

In article <1A*********************@news.xtra.co.nz>, "Nik Coughin" <nr***********@woosh.co.nz> wrote:

Have a look at this:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.preg-replace.php

Read the comment by syd_egan. Now, I know you didn't want actual code, but
there are several challenges here, one of them is that syd_egan's code
presumes that either the http:// or ftp:// schemes are present, so there is
your first challenge. Good luck.

Thank you to all who have replied to my problem with your pointers, I hope
I can work a solution myself ;-).

Dariusz