Something for all you.

[lampcms.com]

I just though I post something that may be useful for someone.

I was looking for a function that would take in a string of text like maybe an email in plaintext format, then find strings that look like urls and turn them into clickable links.

I found one such function on the web. it was just copied from one website to the other and everyone was just posting the same code that sucked.

I made some changes and now it works properly. See if you like it

function makeClickable($text, $maxurl_len = 50, $addNofollow = true, $target = '_blank')
{
    
    if (preg_match_all('/((ht|f)tps?:\/\/([\w\.]+\.)?[\w\-_?&=;]+(\.[a-zA-Z]{2,4})?[^\s\r\n\(\)"\'<>\,\!]+)/si', $text, $urls))
    {
        $offset1 = ceil(0.65 * $maxurl_len) - 2;
        $offset2 = ceil(0.30 * $maxurl_len) - 1;

        $nofollow = (true === $addNofollow) ? 'rel="nofollow"' : '';
        $aUrls = (array_unique($urls[1]));

        foreach ($aUrls as $url){
            if ($maxurl_len && (strlen($url) > $maxurl_len)){
                $urltext = substr($url, 0, $offset1) . '...' . substr($url, -$offset2);
            }else{
                $urltext = $url;
            }

            $pattern = '~([^\w]+)'.preg_quote($url).'([^\w]+)~'; 
        
            $text = preg_replace($pattern, '\\1<a href="'. $url .'" '.$nofollow.' target="'. $target .'">'. $urltext .'</a>\\2', $text);

        }
    }

    return $text;
        
} 

[JeffWalden]

I love it! Thanks for the share.

[Aimhigh]

thanks for sharing. this is very helpful.

[PHPycho]

I just though I post something that may be useful for someone.

I was looking for a function that would take in a string of text like maybe an email in plaintext format, then find strings that look like urls and turn them into clickable links.

I found one such function on the web. it was just copied from one website to the other and everyone was just posting the same code that sucked.

I made some changes and now it works properly. See if you like it

function makeClickable($text, $maxurl_len = 50, $addNofollow = true, $target = '_blank')
{
    
    if (preg_match_all('/((ht|f)tps?:\/\/([\w\.]+\.)?[\w\-_?&=;]+(\.[a-zA-Z]{2,4})?[^\s\r\n\(\)"\'<>\,\!]+)/si', $text, $urls))
    {
        $offset1 = ceil(0.65 * $maxurl_len) - 2;
        $offset2 = ceil(0.30 * $maxurl_len) - 1;

        $nofollow = (true === $addNofollow) ? 'rel="nofollow"' : '';
        $aUrls = (array_unique($urls[1]));

        foreach ($aUrls as $url){
            if ($maxurl_len && (strlen($url) > $maxurl_len)){
                $urltext = substr($url, 0, $offset1) . '...' . substr($url, -$offset2);
            }else{
                $urltext = $url;
            }

            $pattern = '~([^\w]+)'.preg_quote($url).'([^\w]+)~'; 
        
            $text = preg_replace($pattern, '\\1<a href="'. $url .'" '.$nofollow.' target="'. $target .'">'. $urltext .'</a>\\2', $text);

        }
    }

    return $text;
        
} 

did you try for all possible url structure?

[lampcms.com]

No, urlencoded urls will not be picked up, the regex does not include the % and + chars
It's easy to add them though:
replace
[\w\-_?&=;]
with
[\w\-_?&=;%+] // Don't forget to test if you change anything in the regex!

The problem with the old version that I based this function on is that the old one user str_replace and it could not handle situations where a document contained 2 links that were partially the same, for example, if document contained
http://www.php.net and http://www.php.net/str_replace

then if the longer url appeared before the shorter one, the script would replace only the first part of it, it would not be clickable and would look nasty.

My version uses preg_replace with takes care of situations like that and can handle docs in which the same link appears multiple time and where links point to the same domain.