Automatic link detector (PHP + RegEx)

Question

I've created a function that automatically detects links. It works quite fine, except when a HTML tag begins just after a link (without space).

Example :

http://www.google.com is cool

becomes

&lt;a href="http://www.google.com" target="_blank"&gt;www.google.com&lt;/a&gt; is cool

but

http://www.google.com&lt;br />is cool

(without space after http:// in real) becomes

&lt;a href="http://www.google.com&lt;br /" target="_blank"&gt;www.google.com&lt;br /&lt;/a&gt; is cool

My regular expression doesn't stop at first <, though < is not allowed...

How can I fix that ? Or how can I exclude < efficiently ?

Here's my function :

function detect_linkg($str){        
    return preg_replace('#(https?://)([\w\d.&:\#@%/;$~_?\+-=]*)#','<a href="$1$2" target="_blank">$2</a>',$str);
}

Thanks for your help !

Halcyon · Accepted Answer · 2014-04-25 14:29:33Z

1

I think the problem is here: +-=

This actually creates a range, like a-z, but in this case from + to =, and if you look at the ascii chart you see that that includes < (but not >).

Simply escape - if you want the literal: +\-=

answered Apr 25, 2014 at 14:29

Halcyon

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1 Comment

Matthieu Marcé Over a year ago

Thanks, that's the solution !

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