Regex to conditionally replace Twitter hashtags with hyperlinks

Question

I\'m writing a small PHP script to grab the latest half dozen Twitter status updates from a user feed and format them for display on a webpage. As part of this I need a rege

Answer 1

I found Gazlers answer to work, although the regex added a blank space at the beginning of the hashtag, so I removed the first part:

(^|\s)

This works perfectly for me now:

#(\w*[a-zA-Z_0-9]+\w*)

Example here: http://rubular.com/r/dS2QYZP45n