PHP Preg_match multiple items in a single string?

Question

I am currently inserting some body text into the DB. This is just plain text, but the users are also wanting to be able to add working links. To save making mass changes I am doing these changes be using a pop up that will insert their link in the following format:

[a]http://www.google.com[/a]

Each body text can have more than one link in.

When this is displayed on the relevant webpage the links will change to a standard html format:

<a href="http://google.com">http://www.google.com</a>

I can't seem to be able to setup a preg_match to get this to do this multiple times in a string (see example below):

hello world [a]http://google.com[/a] how are you?
Ok. [a]http://yahoo.com[/a] Thanks for asing. [a]http://bing.com[/a]

Any help would greatly be appreciated!!!

Thanks, Kane

Yeah I used this one... code/[a](.*)[/a]/code But it would return the following: code1 => google.com[/a] how are you? Ok. [a]yahoo.com[/a] Thanks for asing. [a]bing.comcode So it was only getting the outside "[a]" and "[/a]" — Kane Mitchell
– Kane Mitchell, Commented Feb 19, 2015 at 15:54

ByteHamster · Accepted Answer · 2015-02-19 15:57:34Z

1

Use this:

$str = "[a]http://www.google.com[/a] xy [a]http://www.google.com[/a]";
$str = preg_replace("/\[a\](.*)\[\/a\]/Usi", "<a href=\"\\1\">\\1</a>", $str);
echo $str;

Output:

<a href="http://www.google.com">http://www.google.com</a> xy <a href="http://www.google.com">http://www.google.com</a>;

answered Feb 19, 2015 at 15:57

ByteHamster

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Comments

hwnd · Accepted Answer · 2015-02-19 16:48:10Z

0

This should work:

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

edited Feb 19, 2015 at 16:48

hwnd

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answered Feb 19, 2015 at 15:55

Toto

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1 Comment

Casimir et Hippolyte Over a year ago

You have escaped the wrong square bracket: [ needs to be escaped, ] don't need.

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