Extract URLs from text in PHP

Question

I have this text:

$string = "this is my friend's website http://example.com I think it is coll";

How can I extract the link into another variable?

I know it should be by using regular expression especially preg_match() but I don't know how?

Answer 1

If the text you extract the URLs from is user-submitted and you're going to display the result as links anywhere, you have to be very, VERY careful to avoid XSS vulnerabilities, most prominently "javascript:" protocol URLs, but also malformed URLs that might trick your regexp and/or the displaying browser into executing them as Javascript URLs. At the very least, you should accept only URLs that start with "http", "https" or "ftp".

There's also a blog entry by Jeff where he describes some other problems with extracting URLs.

Answer 2

Probably the safest way is using code snippets from WordPress. Download the latest one (currently 3.1.1) and see wp-includes/formatting.php. There's a function named make_clickable which has plain text for param and returns formatted string. You can grab codes for extracting URLs. It's pretty complex though.

This one line regex might be helpful.

preg_match_all('#\bhttps?://[^\s()<>]+(?:\([\w\d]+\)|([^[:punct:]\s]|/))#', $string, $match);

But this regex still can't remove some malformed URLs (ex. http://google:ha.ckers.org ).

See also: How to mimic StackOverflow Auto-Link Behavior

Answer 3

preg_match_all('/[a-z]+:\/\/\S+/', $string, $matches);

This is an easy way that'd work for a lot of cases, not all. All the matches are put in $matches. Note that this do not cover links in anchor elements (<a href=""...), but that wasn't in your example either.

Answer 4

You could do like this..

<?php
$string = "this is my friend's website http://example.com I think it is coll";
echo explode(' ',strstr($string,'http://'))[0]; //"prints" http://example.com

Answer 5

public function find_links($post_content){
    $reg_exUrl = "/(http|https|ftp|ftps)\:\/\/[a-zA-Z0-9\-\.]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,3}(\/\S*)?/";
    // Check if there is a url in the text
    if(preg_match_all($reg_exUrl, $post_content, $urls)) {
        // make the urls hyper links,
        foreach($urls[0] as $url){
            $post_content = str_replace($url, '<a href="'.$url.'" rel="nofollow"> LINK </a>', $post_content);
        }
        //var_dump($post_content);die(); //uncomment to see result
        //return text with hyper links
        return $post_content;
    } else {
        // if no urls in the text just return the text
        return $post_content; 
    }
}

Answer 6

You could try this to find the link and revise the link (add the href link).

$reg_exUrl = "/(http|https|ftp|ftps)\:\/\/[a-zA-Z0-9\-\.]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,3}(\/\S*)?/";

// The Text you want to filter for urls
$text = "The text you want to filter goes here. http://example.com";

if(preg_match($reg_exUrl, $text, $url)) {

       echo preg_replace($reg_exUrl, "<a href="{$url[0]}">{$url[0]}</a> ", $text);

} else {

       echo "No url in the text";

}

refer here: http://php.net/manual/en/function.preg-match.php