Creation by ~dhuse on deviantART

If you are using twitter’s API to display your tweets in your Website you have probably faced the problem that your mentions (e.g. @burnmind) and URLs are displayed as plain text and not as active links. You can fix this in a very easy way, using regular expressions in php.

Assuming that you have stored your tweet in the variable named $tweet, you’ll only need the following two lines of code to convert the mentions and URLs to links:

$tweet = preg_replace("/((http)+(s)?:\/\/[^<>\s]+)/i", "<a href=\"\\0\" target=\"_blank\">\\0</a>", $tweet );
$tweet = preg_replace("/[@]+([A-Za-z0-9-_]+)/", "<a href=\"http://twitter.com/\\1\" target=\"_blank\">\\0</a>", $tweet );

If you don’t know how to retrieve your tweet using the twitter’s API you can learn how by reading the following tutorials:

how to retrieve and display your latest tweet using PHP
how to store and retrieve your latest tweet from an XML file

belongs to: tutorials | posted on September, 2009