PHP – parse text and convert urls into hyperlinks

The following function will parse a given text and convert all the urls into links. It does this using regular expressions. It converts email addresses to mailto links as well.

Code

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function parse_links($str) {     $str = str_replace('www.', 'http://www.', $str);     $str = preg_replace('|http://([a-zA-Z0-9-./]+)|', '<a href="http://$1">$1</a>', $str);     $str = preg_replace('/(([a-z0-9+_-]+)(.[a-z0-9+_-]+)*@([a-z0-9-]+.)+[a-z]{2,6})/', '<a href="mailto:$1">$1</a>', $str);     return $str; }