PHP Regex to convert text before colon to link

Question

I need to find the first occurance of a colon \':\' and take the complete string before that and append it to a link.

e.g.

username: @twitter nice site!          


        

Answer 1

I have not tested the code, but it should work as is. Basically you need to capture after @twitter too.

$description = preg_replace("%([^:]+): @twitter (.+)%i", 
    "@\\1: \\2", 
    $description);