How to remove email addresses and links from a string in PHP?

Question

Hi, i need to remove all email addresses and links from a string and replace them with "[removed]" and i'm a bit lost on how to do it.
Can someone help me on this?
Thanks.

Answer 1

You can use preg_replace to do it.

for emails:

$pattern = "/[^@\s]*@[^@\s]*\.[^@\s]*/";
$replacement = "[removed]";
preg_replace($pattern, $replacement, $string);

for urls:

$pattern = "/[a-zA-Z]*[:\/\/]*[A-Za-z0-9\-_]+\.+[A-Za-z0-9\.\/%&=\?\-_]+/i";
$replacement = "[removed]";
preg_replace($pattern, $replacement, $string);

Resources

PHP manual entry: http://php.net/manual/en/function.preg-replace.php

Credit where credit is due: email regex taken from preg_match manpage, and URL regex taken from: http://www.weberdev.com/get_example-4227.html

Answer 2

Try this:

$patterns = array('<[\w.]+@[\w.]+>', '<\w{3,6}:(?:(?://)|(?:\\\\))[^\s]+>');
$matches = array('[email removed]', '[link removed]');
$newString = preg_replace($patterns, $matches, $stringToBeMatched);

Note: you can pass an array of patterns and matches into preg_replace instead of running it twice.

Answer 3

The answer I was going to upvote was deleted. It linked to a Linux Journal article Validate an E-Mail Address with PHP, the Right Way that points out what's wrong with almost every email regex anyone proposes.

The range of valid forms of an email address is much broader than most people think.