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...