Activate URLs and Twitter Profile Links with PHP


In a current project I’m reading in a user’s Twitter feed and displaying it on the hompage of their Wordpress blog. I know that there are a thousand plug-ins that exist to do this exact thing, but I wanted to write my own.


Using the official Twitter API the contents of the individual were returned as plain text, meaning that all HTML links were totally dead. I wanted a way to automatically add the HTML to enable URL’s as well as twitter “@” profile links. I found some regular expressions and with some tweaking came up with these 2 functions.


To activate the URLs in block of text pass it to the following function:

function activateURLS($tweet)
{
    return preg_replace("@(https?://([-\w\.]+)+(:\d+)?(/([\w/_\.]*(\?\S+)?)?)?)@", 
        "<a href="$1" target="_blank">$1</a>", 
        $tweet);
}


To activate Twitter @ profile links using the following PHP block:

function activateTwitterProfiles($tweet)
{
    return preg_replace("/@([^ ,.!#$%^&]+)/", 
        "<a href="http://twitter.com/$1" target="_blank">@$1</a>", 
        $tweet);
}


They’re super easy to use, just call them like this:

activateTwitterProfiles(activateLinks($tweet->text))

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 4th, 2009 at 8:22 am and is tagged as , , , , , , , , .

  1. Mike Bijon:
    February 21st, 2009 @ 7:47 pm

    Hey Dane, it’s weird that I found this via Google, when I could have just emailed or IMd you for same…

    Your solution for linkifying URLs and Twitter profiles works, but leaves a few corner-cases where added characters could sneak in (such as someone putting punctuation like “:”, “-”, or even “@profile2″ immediately after the “@profile”). Disclaimer: The URL/WWW parts are older and well-tested. The Twitter part is my tweak of yours:
    —-

    function makeTwitterificatedURL($msg) {
    // HTTP & FTP links
    $msg = eregi_replace(’(((f|ht){1}(tp://|tps://){1})[-a-zA-Z0-9@:%_\+.~#?&//=]+)’,
    ‘\\1‘,
    $msg);
    // WWW links
    $msg = eregi_replace(’([[:space:]()[{}])(www.[-a-zA-Z0-9@:%_\+.~#?&//=]+)’,
    ‘\\1\\2‘,
    $msg);
    // Twitter @[username] links
    $msg = eregi_replace(’(@[a-zA-Z0-9_]+)’,
    ‘@\\1‘,
    $msg);
    return $msg;
    }

    —-

    Notes for anyone seeing this:
    * The use of eregi_replace() is a code-base preference, you can use whatever works for you.
    * My HTTP & WWW functions are based on characters in “valid” URLs, but could be enhanced with URLEncoding.
    * My @Twitter-profile function is based on characters currently allowed in Twitter profile names (currently that is “var Q = /[a-zA-Z0-9_]/;” from here: https://assets1.twitter.com/javascripts/signup.js [use this to make readable: http://jsbeautifier.org/). If Twitter changes their username rules, mine will break.
    —-

    *(self-promotion)* I’m using this to grab co-workers sweet feed, check GeekStats on Twitter

  2. Mike Bijon:
    February 21st, 2009 @ 8:54 pm

    Apparently I needed that disclaimer, I tested but didn’t read carefully. The Twitter @profile regex needed a tweak:

    function makeTwitterificatedURL($msg) {
    // HTTP & FTP links
    $msg = eregi_replace(’(((f|ht){1}(tp://|tps://){1})[-a-zA-Z0-9@:%_\+.~#?&//=]+)’,
    ‘\\1‘,
    $msg);
    // WWW links
    $msg = eregi_replace(’([[:space:]()[{}])(www.[-a-zA-Z0-9@:%_\+.~#?&//=]+)’,
    ‘\\1\\2‘,
    $msg);
    // Twitter @[username] links
    $msg = eregi_replace(’@([a-zA-Z0-9_]+)’,
    ‘@\\1‘,
    $msg);
    return $msg;
    }

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