Detecting emails in a text

Question

I'm trying to create a function that translates every occurrence of a plain text email address in a given string into it's htmlized version.

Let's say I have the following code, where htmlizeEmails is the function I'm looking for:

$str = "Send me an email to [email protected].";
echo htmlizeEmails($str); // Echoes "Send me an email to <a href="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</a>."

If possible, I'd like this function to use the filter_var function to check if the email is valid.

Does anyone know how to do this? Thanks!

Edit:

Thanks for the answers, I used Shocker's regex to match potential email addresses and then, only if the filter_var validates it, it gets replaced.

function htmlizeEmails($text)
    preg_match_all('/([a-zA-Z0-9._%+-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,6})/', $text, $potentialEmails, PREG_SET_ORDER);
    
    $potentialEmailsCount = count($potentialEmails);
    for ($i = 0; $i < $potentialEmailsCount; $i++) {
        if (filter_var($potentialEmails[$i][0], FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL)) {
            $text = str_replace($potentialEmails[$i][0], '<a href="mailto:' . $potentialEmails[$i][0] .'">' . $potentialEmails[$i][0] .'</a>', $text);
        }
    }
}

Answer 1

$str = preg_replace('/([a-zA-Z0-9._%+-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,6})/', '<a href="mailto:$1">$1</a>', $str);

where ([a-zA-Z0-9._%+-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,6}) is the regular expression used for detecting an email address (this is a general example, email addresses may be more complicated than this and not all addresses may be covered, but finding the perfect regex for emails is up to you)