substr() to preg_replace() matches php - php

Question

I have two functions in PHP, trimmer($string,$number) and toUrl($string). I want to trim the urls extracted with toUrl(), to 20 characters for example. from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HU3GZTNIZ6M to https://www.youtube.com/wa...
function trimmer($string,$number) {
$string = substr ($string, 0, $number);
return $string."...";
}
function toUrl($string) {
$regex="/[^\W ]+[^\s]+[.]+[^\" ]+[^\W ]+/i";
$string= preg_replace($regex, "<a href='\\0'>".trimmer("\\0",20)."</a>",$string);
return $string;
}
But the problem is that the value of the match return \\0 not a variable like $url which could be easily trimmed with the function trimmer().
The Question is how do I apply substr() to \\0 something like this substr("\\0",0,20)?

Answer 1

What you want is preg_replace_callback:
function _toUrl_callback($m) {
return "" . trimmer($m[0], 20) ."";
}
function toUrl($string) {
$regex = "/[^\W ]+[^\s]+[.]+[^\" ]+[^\W ]+/i";
$string = preg_replace_callback($regex, "_toUrl_callback", $string);
return $string;
}
Also note that (side notes wrt your question):
You have a syntax error, '$regex' is not going to work (they don't replace var names in single-quoted strings)
You may want to look for better regexps to match URLs, you'll find plenty of them with a quick search
You may want to run through htmlspecialchars() your matches (mainly problems with "&", but that depends how you escape the rest of the string.
EDIT: Made it more PHP 4 friendly, requested by the asker.