Autolink URLs in MT Entries

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16 Aug 2004

One of the things I really hate about reading newspaper Web sites is they often include URLs but don’t link them. So you have to copy and paste to open them (or just rightclick with the right Firefox extension).

I don’t want my site to look like a big, dumb newspaper. So I wrote a filter using Brad’s regex plugin to autolink URLs in entries. It hasn’t been extensively tested but it has worked for a the half-dozen or so entries in the Project X blog.

Install the regex plugin and then add this to the top of your templates…

<MTAddRegex name="autolink">s![> ](http://[^<" ]+)!<a href="$1">$1</a> !g</MTAddRegex>

Then add the attribute regex="autolink" to your MTEntryBody and MTEntry more tags in your templates: <MTEntryBody regex="autolink">.

Trackback from Movalog Sideblog
August 16, 2004 10:32 PM

Autolink URLs in MT Entries

Excerpt: Autolink URLs in MT Entries...

Terrence Wood
August 17, 2004 5:35 PM

I don’t have MT installed, but I think this regex will also replace existing links, and should read:

s!^">! <a href="$1">$1</a> !g

Trackback from Lummaland
August 17, 2004 11:27 PM

Plain Text Links

Excerpt: Die Extension Plain Text Links f�r Firefox ist unspektakul�r, aber klasse. F�r all die Websites, insbesondere Online-Ausgaben der Zeitungen, die nicht in der Lage sind, einen URL auch klickbar zu ma...

Adam Kalsey
August 18, 2004 11:38 AM

No, the [> ] in my original regex means that the pattern will only match URLs that immediately follow a > (the end of a tag) or a blank space. So it won’t match a URL in an anchor tag.

peter
March 27, 2006 7:26 PM

For me, the regex you supplied only works on the first link immediately after a paragraph tag - and then it mucks up the paragraph tag like so:

<p<a href=

‘sup with that.

This discussion has been closed.

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