PHP Function to Auto Convert URL into Hyperlink

Posted in Web Development on 2 September 2009 3 comments

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().

Example of Usage

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);
Outside of Wordpress?

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;
}
Posted by zen   @   2 September 2009 3 comments
Tags :


  - 3 Comments


Fantastic piece of code.
I tried loads of different code snippets and none of them were close to the perfectness of this code.

steve van assche says:

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!

Raja says:

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..

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