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

preg_match_all ("/a[\s]+[^>]*?href[\s]?=[\s\"\']+".
                "(.*?)[\"\']+.*?>"."([^<]+|.*?)?<\/a>/",
                $var, &$matches);

$matches = $matches[1];
$list = array();

foreach($matches as $var)
{    
    print($var."<br>");
}

Answer 2

I tried to do as Nobu said, using Wordpress, but to much dependencies to other WordPress functions I instead opted to use Nobu's regular expression for preg_match_all() and turned it into a function, using preg_replace_callback(); a function which now replaces all links in a text with clickable links. It uses anonymous functions so you'll need PHP 5.3 or you may rewrite the code to use an ordinary function instead.

<?php 

/**
 * Make clickable links from URLs in text.
 */

function make_clickable($text) {
    $regex = '#\bhttps?://[^\s()<>]+(?:\([\w\d]+\)|([^[:punct:]\s]|/))#';
    return preg_replace_callback($regex, function ($matches) {
        return "<a href=\'{$matches[0]}\'>{$matches[0]}</a>";
    }, $text);
}

Answer 3

URLs have a quite complex definition — you must decide what you want to capture first. A simple example capturing anything starting with http:// and https:// could be:

preg_match_all('!https?://\S+!', $string, $matches);
$all_urls = $matches[0];

Note that this is very basic and could capture invalid URLs. I would recommend catching up on POSIX and PHP regular expressions for more complex things.

Answer 4

The code that worked for me (especially if you have several links in your $string) is:

$string = "this is my friend's website http://example.com I think it is cool, but this is cooler http://www.memelpower.com :)";
$regex = '/\b(https?|ftp|file):\/\/[-A-Z0-9+&@#\/%?=~_|$!:,.;]*[A-Z0-9+&@#\/%=~_|$]/i';
preg_match_all($regex, $string, $matches);
$urls = $matches[0];
// go over all links
foreach($urls as $url) 
{
    echo $url.'<br />';
}

Hope that helps others as well.

Answer 5

This Regex works great for me and i have checked with all types of URL,

<?php
$string = "Thisregexfindurlhttp://www.rubular.com/r/bFHobduQ3n mixedwithstring";
preg_match_all('/(https?|ssh|ftp):\/\/[^\s"]+/', $string, $url);
$all_url = $url[0]; // Returns Array Of all Found URL's
$one_url = $url[0][0]; // Gives the First URL in Array of URL's
?>

Checked with lots of URL's can find here http://www.rubular.com/r/bFHobduQ3n