Extracting and removing URL from a block of text

Question

I have this block of text:

$text = 'This just happened outside the store http://somedomain.com/2012/12/store there might be more text afterwards...';

It needs to be converted to:

$result['text_1'] = 'This just happened outside the store';
$result['text_2'] = 'there might be more text afterwards...';
$result['url'] = 'http://somedomain.com/2012/12/store';

This is my current code, it does detect the url, but i can only remove it from the text, I still need the url value separately in an array:

$string = preg_replace('/https?:\/\/[^\s"<>]+/', '', $text);
//returns "This just happened outside the store  there might be more text afterwards..."

Any ideas? Thanks!

Temporal solution (can this be optimized?)

$text = 'This just happened outside the store http://somedomain.com/2012/12/store There might be more text afterwards...';
preg_match('/https?:\/\/[^\s"<>]+/',$text,$url);
$string = preg_split('/https?:\/\/[^\s"<>]+/', $text);
$text = preg_replace('/\s\s+/','. ',implode(' ',$string));
echo '<a href="'.$url[0].'">'.$text.'</a>';

preg_match() and preg_match_all() are for extracting. Do your replacement afterwards. (Or actually, preg_replace_callback() to do all at once.) — mario
– mario, Commented Nov 9, 2012 at 14:22
thanks for the tip, i updated the original post with your suggestion, it is working fine now. do you think it could be optimized? — Andres SK
– Andres SK, Commented Nov 9, 2012 at 14:38

fedmich · Accepted Answer · 2012-11-09 14:43:17Z

2

Do you need it to store in a variable or just need it inside the ahref? How about this?

<?php
$text = 'This just happened outside the store http://somedomain.com/2012/12/store There might be more text afterwards...';
$pattern = '@(.*?)(https?://.*?) (.*)@';
$ret = preg_replace( $pattern, '<a href="$2">$3</a>', $text );
var_dump( $ret );

$1, $2, and $3 corresponds to the 1st, 2nd, 3rd parenthesis

the output would be

<a href="http://somedomain.com/2012/12/store">There might be more text afterwards...</a>

answered Nov 9, 2012 at 14:43

fedmich

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2 Comments

Andres SK Over a year ago

This is actually a pretty nice solution-- i'm just wondering what would happen if by any chance the block of text contains more than one link.

fedmich Over a year ago

then that means its gonna be included inside the <a too, so should still work. but do try it out with different test cases. You can change the 3rd parenthesis (.*) into (.*?) to make it greedy.

Pedro del Sol · Accepted Answer · 2013-05-24 15:29:23Z

1

you could split your string on the regex using preg_split to give you an array

$result = preg_split('/(https?:\/\/[^\s"<>]+)/', $the_string, -1, PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE);
// $result[0] = preamble
// $result[1] = url
// $result[2] = possible afters

edited May 24, 2013 at 15:29

answered Nov 9, 2012 at 14:22

Pedro del Sol

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4 Comments

Andres SK Over a year ago

it is not returning the url, only the text blocks. Any ideas?

freejosh Over a year ago

You also need to set the PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE flag, and wrap the regex in () to return it in the results.

Chris Over a year ago

Doesn't work. Returns an array with two items, before and after the url

Andres SK Over a year ago

I updated the post with a few new tweaks, kind of works fine. Any ideas on how to improve it?

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