Find url from string with php

Question

following code is used to find url from a string with php. Here is the code:

$string = "Hello http://www.bytes.com world www.yahoo.com";
preg_match('/(http:\/\/[^\s]+)/', $string, $text);
$hypertext = "<a href=\"". $text[0] . "\">" . $text[0] . "</a>";
$newString = preg_replace('/(http:\/\/[^\s]+)/', $hypertext, $string);
echo $newString;

Well, it shows a link but if i provide few link it doesn't work and also if i write without http:// then it doesn't show link. I want whatever link is provided it should be active, Like stackoverflow.com.

Any help please..

Answer 1

A working method for linking with http/https/ftp/ftps/scp/scps: $newStr = preg_replace('!(http|ftp|scp)(s)?:\/\/[a-zA-Z0-9.?&_/]+!', "<a href=\"\\0\">\\0</a>",$str);

I strongly advise NOT linking when it only has a dot, because it will consider PHP 5.2, ASP.NET, etc. links, which is hardly acceptable.

Update: if you want www. strings as well, take a look at this.

Answer 2

If you want to detect something like stackoverflow.com, then you're going to have to check for all possible TLDs to rule out something like Web 2.0, which is quite a long list. Still, this is also going to match something as ASP.NET etc.

The regex would looks something like this:

$hypertext = preg_replace(
    '{\b(?:http://)?(www\.)?([^\s]+)(\.com|\.org|\.net)\b}mi',
    '<a href="http://$1$2$3">$1$2$3</a>',
    $text
);

This only matches domains ending in .com, .org and .net... as previously stated, you would have to extend this list to match all TLDs