In wordpress, if you want to auto convert all URLs in your string into clickable hyperlinks, you can actually do it using the built-in function make_clickable().
The email address and the 2 URLs will be transform into hyperlink (regardless of http:// prefix)
$string = 'I have some texts here and also links such as http://www.youtube.com , www.haha.com and lol@example.com. They are ready to be replaced.'; echo make_clickable($string); |
make_clickable() is located in wp-includes/formatting.php
If you need to do that outside of wordpress, you can refer to the function’s source code at wp-includes/formatting.php
Here it is, a great function by Wordpress :
function _make_url_clickable_cb($matches) { $ret = ''; $url = $matches[2]; if ( empty($url) ) return $matches[0]; // removed trailing [.,;:] from URL if ( in_array(substr($url, -1), array('.', ',', ';', ':')) === true ) { $ret = substr($url, -1); $url = substr($url, 0, strlen($url)-1); } return $matches[1] . "<a href=\"$url\" rel=\"nofollow\">$url</a>" . $ret; } function _make_web_ftp_clickable_cb($matches) { $ret = ''; $dest = $matches[2]; $dest = 'http://' . $dest; if ( empty($dest) ) return $matches[0]; // removed trailing [,;:] from URL if ( in_array(substr($dest, -1), array('.', ',', ';', ':')) === true ) { $ret = substr($dest, -1); $dest = substr($dest, 0, strlen($dest)-1); } return $matches[1] . "<a href=\"$dest\" rel=\"nofollow\">$dest</a>" . $ret; } function _make_email_clickable_cb($matches) { $email = $matches[2] . '@' . $matches[3]; return $matches[1] . "<a href=\"mailto:$email\">$email</a>"; } function make_clickable($ret) { $ret = ' ' . $ret; // in testing, using arrays here was found to be faster $ret = preg_replace_callback('#([\s>])([\w]+?://[\w\\x80-\\xff\#$%&~/.\-;:=,?@\[\]+]*)#is', '_make_url_clickable_cb', $ret); $ret = preg_replace_callback('#([\s>])((www|ftp)\.[\w\\x80-\\xff\#$%&~/.\-;:=,?@\[\]+]*)#is', '_make_web_ftp_clickable_cb', $ret); $ret = preg_replace_callback('#([\s>])([.0-9a-z_+-]+)@(([0-9a-z-]+\.)+[0-9a-z]{2,})#i', '_make_email_clickable_cb', $ret); // this one is not in an array because we need it to run last, for cleanup of accidental links within links $ret = preg_replace("#(<a( [^>]+?>|>))<a [^>]+?>([^>]+?)</a></a>#i", "$1$3</a>", $ret); $ret = trim($ret); return $ret; } |

Fantastic piece of code.
I tried loads of different code snippets and none of them were close to the perfectness of this code.
I agree with Paul,
This is the only perfect solution I could find on the web.
When an url already is an hyperlink, the code ignores it, really brilliant!
Thx!
Hi,
I also agree with Paul. it’s brilliant. I am new to PHP coding and also regular expression. I want to use the same code, but i want to add target to the tag. how can i do it?
Thnks..