Find and Replace Hyperlinks and Email Addresses in PHP

Published on May 14, 2007

These two PHP functions use regular expressions to add the appropriate HTML anchor tags around hyperlinks and email addresses in $string.

PHP Code

function parseHyperlinks($string) {
    // Add <a> tags around all hyperlinks in $string
    return ereg_replace("[[:alpha:]]+://[^<>[:space:]]+[[:alnum:]/]", "<a href=\"\\0\">\\0</a>", $string);
}

function parseEmails($string) {
    // Add <a> tags around all email addresses in $string
    return ereg_replace("[_A-Za-z0-9-]+(\.[_A-Za-z0-9-]+)*@[A-Za-z0-9-]+(\.[A-Za-z0-9-]+)*(\.[A-Za-z]{2,3})", "<a href=\"mailto:\\0\">\\0</a>", $string);
}

Output

Using parseHyperlinks(), http://domain.com/index.htm becomes:

<a href="http://domain.com/index.htm">http://domain.com/index.htm</a>

And using parseEmails(), email@domain.com becomes:

<a href="mailto:email@domain.com">email@domain.com></a>
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5 Responses to Find and Replace Hyperlinks and Email Addresses in PHP

  1. Gavin says:
    December 18, 2007 at 10:51 pm

    This doesn’t correctly parse e-mail addresses with mixed character case, i.e. myEmail@domain.com.

  2. Cory LaViska says:
    December 20, 2007 at 7:10 pm

    Gavin, good catch. I adjusted the regex to support both upper and lowercase.

  3. giu says:
    June 27, 2008 at 8:25 am

    thank you very much. beautifuly code and very useful. will use both functions in my twitter-plugin for wordpress, which I will release in the next few days. needless to say, I will mention you in the about-page and in the source code :) have a nice weekend and keep up the good work!

  4. Adrian says:
    November 18, 2008 at 7:56 am

    Thank you very much! I used this code for my website… http://www.myiptest.com

  5. kushal says:
    April 21, 2009 at 1:05 am

    how can we do the reverse of this?? Can anybody help me into this?