Finding urls and making them hyperlinks

[laredotornado]

Hello,

I want to take a block of text and add html tags to make hyperlinks
where hyperlink strings exist. So, if I have a variable

$a = "This is http://www.yahoo.com"

I would like to run that through a function such that the value of $a
is

"This is <a href='http://www.yahoo.com'>http://www.yahoo.com</a>"

How can I do this? Any help is greatly appreciated. I am using PHP 4.

Thanks, - Dave

[John McClumpha]

On 19 Nov 2005 13:39:46 -0800, la***********@zipmail.com wrote:

I want to take a block of text and add html tags to make hyperlinks
where hyperlink strings exist. So, if I have a variable

$a = "This is http://www.yahoo.com"

I would like to run that through a function such that the value of $a
is

"This is <a href='http://www.yahoo.com'>http://www.yahoo.com</a>"

making the following 2 assumptions:

URL begins with " http" (and there is only one instance within $a)
URL contains no spaces

something like the following (untested) code should work - (this can
most likely be optimized and I'd be interested to know how if anyone
can help out):

<?

$a = "This is http://www.yahoo.com";

// break everything to the left of "http"
$MyURL = substr($a, strpos($a, "http"));
$MyIntro = substr($a, 0, strpos($a, "http"));

// remove anything after URL (if existing)
if (strpos($MyURL," ")) { // there is a space in the string (after
URL)
$MyURL = substr($MyURL, 0, strpos($MyURL, " "));
}

$MyOutput = $MyIntro . "<a href=\"" . $MyURL . "\">" . $MyURL .
"</a>";

echo $MyOutput;
?>
--
John McClumpha
Darkness Reigns - http://www.incitegraphics.com.au/darkness/

[Chung Leong]

Something like this should do the trick:

$a = preg_replace('/(http:\S+)/', '<a href="\1">\1</a>', $a);