Replace URLs in text with HTML links

Question

Here is a design though: For example is I put a link such as

http://example.com

in textarea. How do I get PHP t

Answer 1

This class I created works for my needs, admittedly it does needs some work though;

class addLink
{
    public function link($string)
    {
        $expression = "/(?i)\b((?:https?:\/\/|www\d{0,3}[.]|[a-z0-9.\-]+[.][a-z]{2,63}\/)(?:[^\s()<>]+|\(([^\s()<>]+|(\([^\s()<>]+\)))*\))+(?:\(([^\s()<>]+|(\([^\s()<>]+\)))*\)|[^\s`!()\[\]{};:'\".,<>?«»“”‘’]))/";
        if(preg_match_all($expression, $string, $matches) == 1)// If the pattern is found then
        {
            $string = preg_replace($expression, '$1', $string);
        }

        return $string;       
    }
}

An example of using this code;

include 'PHP/addLink.php';

if(class_exists('addLink')) 
{                  
    $al = new addLink();                  
}
else{
    echo 'Class not found...';
} 

$paragraph = $al->link($paragraph);