Making @Twitter Names Clickable

Matt Hackett — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 07:10:32 +0000

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

@scriptnode

Should be:

@scriptnode

Which looks like:

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

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

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

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

You can run this code right here:

Some @test code

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

scriptNode » regex