How would I make links clickable in forums?

[poopix]

I just finished programming my forums in PHP, and when someone posts a link you can't click on it. How would I make it so links that people post are clickable?

I don't allow HTML in the posts though, so people can't use <a>link</a> themselves. Even if I let them use HTML, theres got to be a way to do it besides having them put <a> and </a>.

 

[Twinkie]

You can search each post, replace it with the str_replace() function and change it into an HTML link before being entered into the forum database.

 

[poopix]

How would I tell when the link ends though? I know I could search the string for 'http://' and replace that with '<a>http://', but how would I figure out where the end of the link is?

 

[Hazirak]

You can just tell PHP to look for the first space after that link. It's been my experience that URLs never have a space in them, so you can tell it to start at 'http://' and simply stop at the first instance of ' ' after that point.

 

[poopix]

Ah, thanks. I feel stupid now for not thinking of that before. >_<
Edit:
Wait, how would I make it a link? Putting <a> before it and </a> after it doesn't make it click-able.

I could put <a href=" before it and "></a> after it, but then there is no text to click on...

 

[Hazirak]

Tell it to find the link and dump it into a variable, then create the links and/or text with it. Basically, a Jimmy-rigged copy-paste procedure.