PHP Regex Question

Question

Hi,

I am developing an application using PHP but I am new to regular expressions, I could not find a solution to my problem. I want to replace all occurences of #word with a link, i have written a preg_match for this:

$text=preg_replace('~#([\p{L}|\p{N}]+)~u', '<a href="/?aranan=$1">#$1</a>', $text);

The problem is, this regular expression also matches the html character codes like

'

and gives corrupt output. I need to exclude the words starting with &# but i do not know how to do that using regular expressions.

Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

You would need to add a [A-Za-z] rule in your regular expression statement so that it only limits itself to letters and no numbers.

I will edit with an example later on.

Answer 2

'~(?<!&)#([\p{L}|\p{N}]+)~u'

That's a negative lookbehind assertion: http://www.php.net/manual/en/regexp.reference.assertions.php

Matches # only if not preceded by &

Answer 3

http://gskinner.com/RegExr/

use this online regular expression constructor. They have explanation for every flag you may want to use.. and you will see highlighted matches in example text.

and yes use [a-zA-Z]