Well this can't be done just with HTML and CSS. You will need a server-side programming language which will read the form entries and parse it looking for URLs and replacing them with full HTML URLs <a> tags. So if you had something like PHP then you would read in the specified field from the $_POST or $_GET array, then with something like a regular expression you would find pattern matches (like using
preg_match_all()) which you then would replace using something like
preg_replace which you would then replace with the proper <a> html tags.
Below is an example I use for a contact us app that replaces http://, https:// and www urls with clickable <a> tag equivalents...
CODE
// Creates URL links for URLs that start with http://, https://, or "www"
function addDisplayURLLinks($contactContent = "") {
$contactContent = preg_replace("/(http[s]?:\/\/)([a-zA-Z0-9_\\\\.\/]*\.)+[a-zA-Z]{2,6}/i","<a href=\"$0\">$0</a>",$contactContent);
$contactContent = preg_replace_callback("/\swww\.([a-zA-Z0-9_\\\\.\/]*\.)+[a-zA-Z]{2,6}/i",create_function('$matches','$theurl = "http://" . trim($matches[0]); return "<a href=\"$theurl\">$theurl</a>";'),$contactContent);
return $contactContent;
}
Of course this isn't perfect in all situations but it gets most of the decently formatted URLs out there. Feel free to use as your own leisure.
Hope it helps.
9 Oct, 2008 - 12:09 PM
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