Comments on: Automatically linking Twitter @usernames in PHP

By: Gavin

Gavin — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 15:14:31 +0000

helped me solve a problem I was having with my own twitter parser, cheers

By: thanking you!

thanking you! — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 06:02:12 +0000

thanks. just what i needed. works perfectly =)

thank you.

By: Medical Revision

Medical Revision — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 18:46:47 +0000

Hey man – thanks a lot for this. You helped me understand regex a lot better. Hopefully will have it working properly on allaboutchris.co.uk soon!

By: aaron

aaron — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 17:32:57 +0000

@larry: the /i flag makes the regex case-insensitive, so it’s not necessary to include A-Z. /[a-zA-z]/ and /[a-z]/i are equivalent expressions.

By: Ferodynamics

Ferodynamics — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 02:08:40 +0000

I doubt Twitter scans their database to see if a username actually exists (before linking to it) because that would slow things down. I saw a tweet today on Twitter’s website: “sold @2.45″ meaning “sold at $2.45″ and Twitter assumed this was user “2″ cut off at the period. Twitter.com/2 actually exists, which is all the more tragic. So if I incorrectly match an email address, I hereby apologize in advance

By: larry

larry — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:13:39 +0000

Don’t forget to include A-Z in the for capitalized letters

By: aaron

aaron — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:45:00 +0000

@cometbus

That actually just occurred to me the other day when I was writing some code to parse some text that has an equal chance of containing Twitter usernames as it does email addresses. Typically tweets don’t contain email addresses so it isn’t usually a problem.

Here is my updated regex.

preg_replace(’/(^|[^a-z0-9_])@([a-z0-9_]+)/i’, ‘$1@$2’, $tweet);

This requires either a non-alphanumeric character preceding the @ sign, or matches the username at the beginning of the line.

By: Cometbus

Cometbus — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:16:14 +0000

Even with the fixes in the comments, consider this:

@cometbus have you seen @ahem’s last tweet? You can email me at foo@example.com. #contactme@email.

You will get :
@cometbus
@ahem
@example
@email

By: aaron

aaron — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 21:05:19 +0000

@Remco thanks for catching that. I’ve updated the post.

By: Remco Tolsma

Remco Tolsma — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 14:41:36 +0000

@aaron The second example is not working correctly. You should first replace the links within the tweet and then the @username. $search = array('|(http://[^ ]+)|', '|@([0-9a-z_]+)|'); $replace = array('$1', '@$1');