custom tag of <url> without any delimiter or with delimiter "space"

[dotJoon]

$myString1="I often visit <url>www.sitepoint.com/forums</url> 
and <url>www.google.com</url>.";

$myString2="I often visit <url>www.sitepoint.com/forums sitePointForums</url>
and <url>www.google.com google</url>.";

$myString1=preg_replace('/<url>(.*?)<\/url>/s',
 '<a href="http://$1">$1</a>', $myString1);

$myString2=preg_replace('/<url>(.*?) (.*?)<\/url>/s', 
'<a href="http://$1">$2</a>', $myString2); 

echo $myString1.'<hr>';

echo $myString2.'<hr>';

result
I often visit <a href="http://www.sitepoint.com/forums">www.sitepoint.com/forums</a> 
and <a href="http://www.google.com">www.google.com</a><hr>
I often visit <a href="http://www.sitepoint.com/forums">sitePointForums</a> 
and <a href="http://www.google.com">google</a><hr>

I can say blue parts are urls and red parts are link texts.
In myString2, there are spaces as delimiters between www.sitepoint.com/forums and sitePointForums or www.google.com and google which are inside the start <url> tag and the end </url> tag.

On the contrary, myString1 has no space between the start <url> tags and the end </url> tags.

In myString1, urls become directly link texts.



If I have myString3 which has links with delimiters and without delimiters like the below,
how can I make my target result below when a custom tag of <url> has space as a delimiter make the link text with the text after delimiter
and when a custom tag of <url> has no space make the link text with the url itself.

$myString3="I often visit <url>www.sitepoint.com/forums</url> 
and <url>www.google.com google</url>.";

result

I often visit 
<a href="http://www.sitepoint.com/forums">www.sitepoint.com/forums</a>
and <a href="http://www.google.com">google</a><hr>

[StarLion]

Run both patterns over the string. (Hint: run pattern 2 first)

[dotJoon]

$myString3="I often visit <url>www.sitepoint.com/forums</url> 
and <url>www.google.com google</url>.";

$myString3=preg_replace('/<url>(.*?) (.*?)<\/url>/s', '<a href="http://$1">$2</a>', $myString3); 

$myString3=preg_replace('/<url>(.*?)<\/url>/s', '<a href="http://$1">$1</a>', $myString3);

echo $myString3.'<hr>';

The code above which is written pattern2 first get the result3 below.

result3

I often visit <a href="http://www.sitepoint.com/forums</url>">
and <url>www.google.com google</a>.<hr>

On the contrary, my target result is like the below
target result

I often visit <a href="http://www.sitepoint.com/forums">sitePointForums</a> 
and <a href="http://www.google.com">google</a><hr>

[StarLion]

Try using this as your first pattern instead:

"#<url>([^\s]*?) ([^<]*?)</url>#s"

[dotJoon]

Thank you very much, StarLion. Your code works nice.