scriptNode

Here's a super quick Script Sunday for you: making @Twitter usernames clickable. Here's an example:

@scriptnode

Should be:

@<href="http://twitter.com/scriptnode">scriptnode</a>

Which looks like:

@scriptnode

And here's how to do it in PHP and JavaScript:

PHP

$text = preg_replace('#@([a-z0-9_]+)#i', '@<a href="http://twitter.com/\\1">\\1</a>', $text);

That was easy! Now let's get to the more interesting JavaScript, which allows us to test inline!

JavaScript

text = text.replace(/@([a-z0-9_]+)/gi, '@<a href="http://twitter.com/$1">$1</a>');

You can run this code right here:

Format

I'm awful at regular expressions; please do let me know if I could optimize somewhere or if I missed something. Edit: + instead of *

Read other articles tagged: javascript, php, regex, script-sunday, tutorials

Comments (2)

• 
  August 31st, 2009 Jani Hartikainen said…

  I think you should use + rather than a *

  With your current regex, even a single @ will match – and I don’t think that’s very useful =)
• 
  August 31st, 2009 Matt Hackett said…

  @Jani: thanks, good point!

Thoughts?

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