PHP Regex - text into link

Question

What I'm trying to do is, replacing symbols that would be changed start the string then the last symbol that would close the string - changing both of them into a link then it will be stored into the database, it's something like Wikipedia.

I want to have something like this when someone types in the textarea:

"This woman was killed by [Tom Hanks] in 2002"

The [ and ] will be converted into a link with the Tom Hanks in the link href (which is directed by htaccess - I've done this already).

So, it should output something like this:

"This woman was killed by <a href=\"Tom Hanks\">Tom Hanks</a> in 2002"

The link location will always be the name of the wrapped text.

After that, it should be able to be stored into the database with the slashes.

Answer 1

$result = preg_replace('/\[(.*?)\]/i', '<a href=\"$1\">$1</a>', $subject);

Answer 2

You can use:

$s = preg_replace('~\[(.*?)\]~is', '<a href="\1">\1</a>', $s);

Answer 3

Note that you may want to prevent quote marks and tags in the URL which could result in unwanted HTML codes being output.

$result = preg_replace("/\[([^\"\'<>\[\]]+)\]/i", "<a href=\"$1\">$1</a>", $subject);