Find twitter hashtags using jQuery, and apply a link

Question

I\'d like to start this off by saying I\'m hardly a pro at jQuery, and this seems like a non-standard question.

Basically I\'m making a blog in wordpress, and incorp

Answer 1

You would craft a regular expression to find those hashtags and replace them with a link, using backreferences to get the matching tag.

hashtag_regexp = /#([a-zA-Z0-9]+)/g;

function linkHashtags(text) {
    return text.replace(
        hashtag_regexp,
        '#$1'
    );
} 

$(document).ready(function(){
    $('p').each(function() {
        $(this).html(linkHashtags($(this).html()));
    });
});

Edit: I've moved the relevant code inside a function that accepts a string with hashtags, and returns the same string with the tags replaced by links. It doesn't rely on jQuery that way.

$('p').html(linkHashtags($('p').html()));

You just pass it an elements html value and replace the value by the result of calling linkHashtags. One could probably write a jQuery plugin to make this easier to use.

Example

That regular expression might need some work, I'm not sure which characters are allowed to be used inside a hashtag, but I think you get the idea.