recognizing a url in php form

[juniorx]

Basically i need advice on how to recognize a url. Say a user fills in info for a news page and half way through the news info he types http://www.cnn.com (into a textbox) Basically i want to know how the server will post this as a link rather then as a long string of text that other users can't click

Edit: Notice in my post it automatically creates the link to cnn website without me having to type some code.

[cpradio]

Do a search on php.net for preg_replace or ereg_replace, you will find the code that does this in the comments of other users.

[sidney]

do somthing like below

$txt = "how to recognize a url. Say a user fills in info for a news page and half HTTPS://www.cnn.com way through the news info he types http://www.cnn.com";
$txt=preg_replace("//(https?:\/\/[^ ]*)/si"," <a href=\"$1\">$1</a> ",$txt);
echo $txt;