Parsing Links Like phpBB

Hey there,

I've recently taken a run at parsing links using php. I can't quite work out how to do it, so I'll just post what I'm trying to accomplish.

I have entries within a database, that include text and html. I've got that selected as $content.

I'm trying to get a function or set of functions to take this, and replace this:


<a href="http://myblog.com/">My Blog!</a>


with


[ url=http://myblog.com/]My Blog![ /url]


I just need to work out how to parse the link from within href="" and move it to after [url= then close it with ]. After that take what was within the anchor tags and put it between the [ url=] and [ /url] tags.

An ideas, or help?

Thanks everyone, Greatly appreciated.

Please ignore the spacing on the bb code, it was so that it would display on the forum.

This should do what you asked. The preg functions are the right stuff to be using, and regex is always good to learn.

preg_replace("/<a href=\"(.*?)">(.*?)</a>/", "[ url=$1]$2[ /url]", $content);

(remove the whitespace in the url tags of course.

Thanks for that.

I'm just going to take a shot in the dark, and hope it's right, but, is this how I could reverse it, for the database entry?

(Assuming $content is the BB version, and we want to make it html)

preg_replace("/[ url=(.*?)](.*?)[/ url]/", "<a href=\"$1\">$2</a>", $content);

Thanks. :)

Close, on the regex side, you have to escape chars like [ and ] and / so it would be:

preg_replace("/\[ url=(.*?)\](.*?)\[\/ url\]/", "<a href=\"$1\">$2</a>", $content);

Hey thanks for that, I'll be sure to have a read up of it soon.

I noticed on your first code your posted, it was missing \ before a quote so I added it in and then I got this message:

Warning: preg_replace() [function.preg-replace]: Unknown modifier 'a' in C:\Docum...

I was using this code (minus the url whitespaces)

preg_replace("/<a href=\"(.*?)\">(.*?)</a>/", "[ url=$1]$2[ /url]", $content);

oh, you probably have to escape the < and > as well, I just did it off the top of my head.

Thanks man, I did a bit of research, and found some answers on how the syntax works. This is going to help me a lot in future. Thank you so much. :)