Recently I have had to integrate some tweets into a clients website via RSS. The problem I found is that the links are hidden in the description and are not active. The solution is as simple as using 3 regular expressions and replace the text URL with a HTML URL using PHPs eregi_replace function.

 
 
function activateLinks($string)
{  
 
// This regular expression looks for <strong>http:// </strong>type url
$string = eregi_replace('(((f|ht){1}tp://)[-a-zA-Z0-9@:%_+.~#?&//=]+)',
'<a href="1" target=_blank>1</a>', $string);
 
// This regular expression looks for <strong>www. </strong>type url
$string = eregi_replace('([[:space:]()[{}])(www.[-a-zA-Z0-9@:%_+.~#?&//=]+)',
'1<a href="http://2" target=_blank>2</a>', $string);
 
// This regular expression looks for <strong>[email protected]</strong>
$string = eregi_replace('([_.0-9a-z-]+@([0-9a-z][0-9a-z-]+.)+[a-z]{2,3})',
'<a href="mailto:1" target=_blank>1</a>', $string);
 
return $string;
 
}
 
//call function where ever you need it
$string= 'Scaling a dynamic background image in proportion using flashvisit
(http://www.flashnutz.com) or email me on [email protected]'; 
 
echo activateLinks($string);
 

The output of the string would be

 
//output of $string
$string = 'Scaling a dynamic background image in proportion using flash visit
(<a href="http://www.flashnutz.com">http://www.flashnutz.com</a>) or
email me on <a href="mailto:[email protected]"> [email protected]</a>';
 

My next post will be how to read your twitter posts with php and then use this function to active the links within them.

Happy coding...

To display a list of files within a directory using PHP you need to use opendir() and readdir(). Below is a function that will return the list of files and remove the . and .. from the listing.

 
//full path of directory
$dir = "/var/www/images/";
 
function listFiles($dir){
 
//open directory and read its contents
if ($handle = opendir($dir)) {
while (false !== ($file = readdir($handle))) {
 
//only display filenames
if ($file != "." && $file != "..") {
echo "$file\n";
}
}
closedir($handle);
}
}
 

You might run into trouble trying to find the correct full path of the images. For example in a windows hosting environment the path could be  (c://blah/blah), in a Linux environment it could be (/var/www/blah/blah).

To find the exact path for your environment use phpinfo(). Once you have the php info look for the DOCUMENT_ROOT entry.

I'm going to show you how to use dynamic variable names in php. It's quite simple, just put your variable name in between {} symbols.

// declare prefix. In a loop this would probably be a number.
$prefix = "pfx";
 
// build your variable
${"varname_{$prefix}"}    = "success";
 
//This would output "success"
echo $varname_pfx;

Simple isn't it....

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What is dompdf?  Well basically its a HTML to PDF converter. It's rendering engine is built in PHP and is style-driven which means it will download and read external stylesheets, inline style tags, and the style attributes of individual HTML elements.

I won't go into detail of how to use it (unless you want me to or would like to write about it), but recently I  had an issue with images not rendering  in the pdf. At first I thought it was a permissions problem, then I thought it was an image type problem. It turns out it was a file location issue.

instead of the file location being:

<img src="images/myimage.jpg" style="width:200px;height:200px">

It should be:

<img src="/var/www/images/myimage.jpg" style="width:200px;height:200px">

So as you can see it needs to reference the file from the server side file directory and not just from within the web directory.

Wish someone wrote this, when I needed it....