Adding links to discussion board messages

[calista]

Gee, no sooner do I launch my discussion board, but the users have requested some enhancements. Can you believe that?! ;-)

Seriously, folks, I know it's Friday afternoon, but I didn't want to wait until Monday to post this question. I have been requested to add a feature that will automatically create a clickable link in a message when the user types "

http://whatever.com"

or mailto:whoever@whereever.com (just like this board does). Any ideas?

Thanks a lot! Calista,
Jedi Knight
Champion of the Force

 

[GunJack]

I don't see a real simple solution but what you can do is just create a loop that uses the find() function to find an occurance of "

http://"

and then do a find() again to find the next white space. This will give you the location of a link which you can then use the replace() function to replace it with a properly formatted link. Since it's Friday afternoon, I don't have a lot of time for details or to check the code but something like this might work.

<cfset x=1>
<!--- Don't remove the space before http:// in the next line --->
<cfloop condition=&quot;find(msgBody,&quot;

http://&quot;,x)

gt 0>
<cfset y=&quot;find(msgBody,&quot; &quot;,x)>
<cfset link=mid(msgBody,x,y-x+1)>
<cfset msgBody=replace(msgBody,link,&quot;<a href=&quot;&quot;#link#&quot;&quot;>#link#</a>&quot>
<cfset x=find(msgbody,link,y)
</cfloop>

You'll need to add some checks for links that end a sentence as you'll have to strip off the period from the end.

I doubt this will work exactly as is but should be close. I may have the parameters reversed on the find() function but for late in the day Friday, I think it's pretty good

Hope it helps,
GJ

 

[calista]

Just for everyone's FYI, there is a custom tag on Allaire's Developer Exchange called markupURL.cfm that does the job. Why reinvent the wheel, right? Calista :-X
Jedi Knight,
Champion of the Force