I'm trying to make a BB Code script, setting the Bold, Italic, URL etc is easy enought but how do you make it scan for rogue links that aren't placed in a URL tag and same goes for email because I just can't get it to work.

htmlentities()

Hey rob! Can you explain to me how that's used please?

Thats now what I mean, I want to be able to detect a plain text URL strait out of some text for example what forums do:

http://www.squarehybrid.com

you will note that I have not placed the [url] tags around them the link has been activated.

I'm not exactly sure of the PHP code to do this, but the algorithm might be for a string X, search the string until you detect "http://" ... from that on, it is a link until you reach whitespace. For each letter that isn't part of the URL, copy it directly into a new string X2. When you do detect a URL, add the appropriate code before and after it, and then copy it into X2. I think that might be a lot easier than inserting into the middle of the original string. I'm not sure how flexible php is with strings compared to C++ and Java, for example. Since it is a scripting language, however, I would assume it would natively be built to handle strings very well.

Oh you could use preg_replace() with some regular expression trickery...

www.php.net/preg-replace
www.regular-expressions.info

look at all the PHP functions avalable for doing something like this I have only found two that should work. They are preg_replace and eregi_replace but I only know the basics of how they work. for example

[php]$text = preg_replace("#\[b\](.+?)\[/b\]#i","<b>\\1</b>",$text);[/php]

that would take what ever the value of text is and if it finds [b] (in eather case) it will make the string that is inside bold.

I have looked at the PHP's preg syntaxs (sp) and I don't understand how they work well enough to know what to do.