CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpjavascriptregex
tylerl
tylerl

Reputation: 1180

Convert JS Regex to PHP Regex

My understanding of Regex isn't great and I need to adapt my working JS code to PHP.

This is one of the run-throughs in JavaScript (it finds hashtags and makes HTML anchor tags out of them):

exp = /(^|\s)#(\w+)/g;
messagetext = messagetext.replace(exp, "$1<a class='myHashtag' href='http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23$2' target='_blank'>#$2</a>");

How would this be done in PHP?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 267

Answers (1)

Casimir et Hippolyte
Casimir et Hippolyte

Reputation: 89639

You can do it like this:

$messagetext = preg_replace('~^\h*+#\K\w++~m',
  '<a class="myHashtag" '
 .'href="http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23$0" target="_blank">#$0</a>',
  $messagetext);

pattern detail:

^       # line's begining
\h*+    # horizontal space (ie space or tab), zero or more times (possessive)
#       # literal #
\K      # forgets all the begining!
\w++    # [a-zA-Z0-9_] one or more times (possessive)

Delimiters are ~ but you can choose other characters.

I use the multiline mode (m modifier), thus ^ stands for line's begining.

(possessive) indicates to the regex engine that it don't need to backtrack by adding a + after a quantifier. The subpattern becomes then more efficient.

Upvotes: 3

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