PHP: find links in a string and replace them with actual html link tags

Blog/PHP · 2010-11-24 · urlstoreplace str numofurlstoreplace urls alreadyadded numofurlstoreplace count urlstoreplace html link tags

Currently I'm working on an application that gets data from Twitter. The tweet's string contains links that have to be transformed into html link tags. Here is a simple PHP function that helped me.

function makeLinks($str) {
  $reg_exUrl = "/(http|https|ftp|ftps)\\:\\/\\/[a-zA-Z0-9\\-\\.]+\\.[a-zA-Z]{2,3}(\\/\\S*)?/";
  $urls = array();
  $urlsToReplace = array();
  if (preg_match_all($reg_exUrl, $str, $urls)) {
      $numOfMatches = count($urls[0]);
      $numOfUrlsToReplace = 0;
      for ($i = 0;$i < $numOfMatches;$i++) {
          $alreadyAdded = false;
          $numOfUrlsToReplace = count($urlsToReplace);
          for ($j = 0;$j < $numOfUrlsToReplace;$j++) {
              if ($urlsToReplace[$j] == $urls[0][$i]) {
                  $alreadyAdded = true;
              }
          }
          if (!$alreadyAdded) {
              array_push($urlsToReplace, $urls[0][$i]);
          }
      }
      $numOfUrlsToReplace = count($urlsToReplace);
      for ($i = 0;$i < $numOfUrlsToReplace;$i++) {
          $str = str_replace($urlsToReplace[$i], "<a href=\\"".$urlsToReplace[$i]."\\">" . $urlsToReplace[$i] . "</a> ", $str);
      }
      return $str;
  } else {
      return $str;
  }
}