Posted by Jochem Maas on 12/20/05 15:59

Anders Norrbring wrote:
>
> I'm writing a filter/parsing function for texts entered by users, and
> I've run into a problem...
> What I'm trying to do is to parse URLs of different sorts, ftp, http,
> mms, irc etc and format them as links, that part was real easy..
>
> The hard part is when a user has already entered a complete link..
> In short:
>
> http://www.server.tld/page.html
> should be converted to:
> <a
> href='http://www.server.tld/page.html'>http://www.server.tld/page.html</a>
>
> That part works fine, but if the user enters:
>
> <a href='http://www.server.tld/page.html'>click here</a>
>
> it all becomes a mess... Can somebody please make a suggestion on this?

regular expressions - in particular a 'negative look behind' assertion.

here is a page that [trys to] explain it:
http://www.mircscripts.org/showdoc.php?type=tutorial&id=2409

google given loads of hits for 'negative look behind', hopefully you
get somewhere - me I have too little time to right now to go into
examples. good luck

[Back to original message]