PHP Regex Help for hashtags

Question

Hello Peeps,

I have the following string:

$str = '#hello how are #you and #you and #you';

I would like to wrap some html around those which have the hash tag in front of them, for exampe:

echo preg_replace("/#([A-Za-z0-9_]+)(?= )/", "<a href='http://url.com/$1'&gt;$0&lt;/a&gt;", $str);

Which will output:

#hello how are #you and #you and #you

Notice that each URL link has not got the hash tag in the link.

However, this is my problem, because of there is no space at the end of the last #you it doesn't match the regex and obviously doesn't get included. I'm not sure what to do really, as some may have spaces after, and some might not, but I dont want to include the space in the output (hence the (?= ) ) but I don't know what else I can do.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

use (\s|\Z) this will match either whitespace or the end-of-line

Answer 2

You can switch the selector to the exclude mode such as ([^ ,.]+). Thus should work for all of the instances.