I have a few hundred html files that I want to show on a website. They all have links in them in the following format:
[My Test URL|https://www.mywebsite.com/test?param=123]
The problem is that some urls are split up so:
[My Test URL|https://www.mywebsite.c om/test?param=123]
I want to replace all of those with the HTML counter-part so:
<a href="https://www.mywebsite.com/test?param=123">My Test URL</a>
I know that with the regex "/[(.*?)]/" I can match the brackets but how can I split by the pipe, remove the whitespaces in the URL and convert everything to a string?
If you just want to remove (white)spaces in the URL part in these markdown links you can use a mere preg_replace like
preg_replace('~(?:\G(?!\A)|\[[^][|]*\|)[^][\s]*\K\s+(?=[^][]*])~', '', $text)
See the regex demo. Details:
(?:\G(?!\A)|\[[^][|]*\|) - end of the previous match or [, then zero or more chars other than [, ] and | and then a | char[^][\s]* - zero or more chars other than [, ] and whitespace\K - discard all text matched so far\s+ - one or more whitespaces(?=[^][]*]) - there must be zero or more chars other than [ and ] and then a ] immediately to the right of the current location.If you want to remove spaces inside the URL part and convert markdown to HTML, you had better use preg_replace_callback:
$text = '[My Test URL|https://ww w.mywebsite.c om/t est?param=123]';
echo preg_replace_callback('/\[([^][|]*)\|([^][]+)]/', function($m) {
return '<a href="' . str_replace(' ', '', $m[2]) . '">' . $m[1] . '</a>';
}, $text);
See the PHP demo. Details:
\[ - a [ char([^][|]*) - Group 1: any zero or more chars other than [, ] and |\| - a | char([^][]+) - Group 2: any one or more chars other than ] and [] - a ] char.If you want to remove all WHITESPACES from a string in php all you need to do is:
$string = str_replace(' ', '', $string);
Where $string is your string with the url.
I think this will do it for you
$html = "[My Test URL|https://www.mywebsite.c om/test?param=123] [My Test URL|https://www.mywebsite.com/test?param=123]";
$html = preg_replace_callback("|\[.*?\|.*?\]|", function($matches){
list($anchor, $link) = explode("|",substr($matches[0], 1, -1));
return "<a href='".str_replace(' ', '', $link)."'>$anchor</a>";
}, $html);
echo $html;
// echos <a href="https://www.mywebsite.com/test?param=123">My Test URL</a> <a href="https://www.mywebsite.com/test?param=123">My Test URL</a>