Auto-Linking URLs with PHP

Sean Murphy — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 23:54:30 +0000

A week or so ago I was working on a bug in the auto-linking code for Laconica, the software that powers Indenti.ca. Squashing that particular bug wasn’t too hard, but I wanted to take the functionality a step further (closer to the calibre of Gmail) and it turns out, writing robust auto-linking code is more difficult than it initially seems. So I played with it a little at a time here and there, testing as many edge cases as I could think of. The result is a function that’s more robust than most URL auto-linking code I’ve come across.

I still need to add support of internationalized TLDs and HTML. So, although it only works with plain text for now, I think it’s off to a good start. Check out the demo or download the source.

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Negative Word Matching with Regular Expressions

Sean Murphy — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 22:42:34 +0000

Today on the #codeigniter IRC channel someone asked about how to match a string that didn’t start with a specific word using a regex. I quickly threw out that, off the top of my head, /^(word){0}/ should work. Well, surprisingly, it didn’t. Turns out negatively matching words with regular expressions is a little more difficult.

After a little research I came up with a working solution: /^(?!word).*/

This post by Jeff Atwood helped: Excluding matches with Regular Expressions

Hello, I am Sean Murphy » regex

Auto-Linking URLs with PHP

Negative Word Matching with Regular Expressions