Find HTTP:// and create link
 

Hello all.

I would like to search a DIV and find the static, nonlinked,
http://www.website.com inside the DIV and make it an active. Is there a simple way to do this? I know I can search the div somehow, but how do I replace?

Thanks!

Try the following code:

Thanks for the response, works perfect. I am not sure I understand how it is working however. Are these comments correct:

function TalkPHP_MakeLinks(pWithinElement)
{
//if there is no DIV with this name, do nothing.
if (!pWithinElement)
{
return false;
}

//this var equals the DIV to be "edited"
var szContent = pWithinElement.innerHTML;
//this finds the HTTP and makes it a link...
pWithinElement.innerHTML = szContent.replace(/(http:\/\/.+?)[\s|\n]/ig, '<a href="$1">$1</a> ');
}

Can you explain this:

http:\/\/.+?)[\s|\n]/ig

Thanks again!^^

/(http:\/\/.+?)[\s|\n]/ig creates a regular expression object with the pattern (http:\/\/.+?)[\s|\n] and flags i (case insensitive) and g (global).

The pattern itself searches for (and retains for later) the characters "http://" followed by one or more (+) single characters (.; 'single character' means any character except a newline). The question mark (?) makes the 'one or more single characters' what is called ungreedy (which is important but we can gloss over it right now). Next, [\s|\n] matches either a whitespace character (tab, space, newline), a vertical pipe character or a newline character (I think Wildhoney really meant just \s so that the match stops at whitespace (thanks to the ungreedy repetition earlier)).

Put simply, we match all instances of "http://" followed by one or more characters, followed by a whitespace character.

Thanks Salathe. Yes, I did mean that. Either a space or a line break, but it would seem a space in this context behaves as a new line as well. Why is this? I thought it would look for a space, and so I had to specify either a space or a new line.

The following regular expression appears to work just fine, even if the link appears at the end of a line followed by a line break:

The \s escape sequence matches any whitespace character which includes the space character along with such beauties as the tab and newline characters.