amdavidson

Hashtag and Username Linking in Twitter Apps

posted on 2009-05-12 - amd.im/ZoL2

Are you trying to add automatic hashtag and username hot linking in your PHP twitter app?

I just tried to do this with my amdavidson.me lifestreaming site. It's just two nested regular expressions. If there's some problem with nested preg_replace functions, or if any regular expression geniuses have better ideas, feel free to comment.

But if not, here's a little code for you, should make things super easy. It assumes your tweet variable is $tweet, replace with whatever you'd need.

echo preg_replace('/\#([a-zA-Z0-9_]{1,15})?/', 
  "<a href=\"http://hashtags.org/tag/$1\">#$1</a>", 
  preg_replace('/\@([a-zA-Z0-9_]{1,15})?/', 
  "<a href=\"http://twitter.com/$1\">@$1</a>", 
  $tweet));