Extract link from a string, change urls and rebuild string in php

Question

Is there a way to find all urls inside a string and save each trunk of the original message in an array?

My goal is to intercepts url, change it with a function that change some parameters in the url, and rebuild original string.

Example:

$original_string = "Hi, this is a list of urls: http://www.google.it, www.amazon.it, https://www.amzn.to/XXXXX and at the end we have www.example.it";

Expected result:

$result = array(
0 => "Hi, this is a list of urls: ",
1 => "http://www.google.it",
2 => ", ",
3 => "www.amazon.it",
4 => ", ",
5 => "https://www.amzn.to/XXXXX",
6 => " and at the end we have ",
7 => "www.example.it"
);

After this result, i can edit my link with a function i've already done and rebuild the string.

I can find all urls inside a string with: preg_match_all('#\bhttps?://[^,\s()<>]+(?:\([\w\d]+\)|([^,[:punct:]\s]|/))#', $original_string, $urls);

but i lost all other text...

UPDATE: tried this code as suggested, but i get strange result:

$x = preg_split('#\bhttps?://[^,\s()<>]+(?:\([\w\d]+\)|([^,[:punct:]\s]|/))#', $original_string, -1, PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE);

var_dump($x);



  array(9) {
  [0]=>
  string(28) "Hi, this is a list of urls: "
  [1]=>
  string(1) "t"
  [2]=>
  string(2) ", "
  [3]=>
  string(1) "t"
  [4]=>
  string(2) ", "
  [5]=>
  string(1) "X"
  [6]=>
  string(24) " and at the end we have "
  [7]=>
  string(1) "t"
  [8]=>
  string(0) ""
}

Answer 1

Your best bet is regular expressions. According to your original problem description, very likely you'll need to use preg_replace_callback function, rather than splitting the string into array, processing and re-assembling it.

I can't say it's a reliable source to use, but start from PHP: Regular Expression to get a URL from a string if you need help creating a regular expression. Or just use a web search :)

This online tool can be useful to understand regexps better - https://regex101.com/

Here is an example with regular expression taken from Extract URLs from text in PHP

$pattern = '(?xi)\b((?:https?://|www\d{0,3}[.]|[a-z0-9.\-]+[.][a-z]{2,4}/)(?:[^\s()<>]+|\(([^\s()<>]+|(\([^\s()<>]+\)))*\))+(?:\(([^\s()<>]+|(\([^\s()<>]+\)))*\)|[^\s`!()\[\]{};:\'".,<>?«»“”‘’]))';

var_export(preg_replace_callback("#$pattern#i", function($matches) {
    $url = $matches[0];
    // put your code here. Or call your existing function/method with the $url parameter
    return '->' . $url . '<-';
  }, $original_string) ));