How to extract URLs from text in PHP

Question

I have this text:

$string = "this is my friend's website http://example.com I think it is coll";

How can I extract the link into another variable?

I know it should be by using regular expression especially preg_match() but I don't know how?

Answer 1

Hello,

A simple example capturing anything starting with http:// and https:// could be:

preg_match_all('!https?://\S+!', $string, $matches);
$all_urls = $matches[0];

Note that this is very basic and could capture invalid URLs.