Wrap html <a> tag around a twitter username in a tweet with php

Question

I want to wrap tags around the usernames in my tweets so that I can style them a differen't colour and link through to them. For example if this was my tweet:

@benpaton Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.

I would like to do this:

<a href="http://www.twitter.com/benpaton" target="_blank" class="green">@benpaton</a> Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. 

This is the php I'm using at the moment to render my latest tweet at the moment currently with out links:

        <?php
        /** Script to pull in the latest tweet */
        $username='benpaton'; // set user name
        $format='json'; // set format
        $tweet=json_decode(file_get_contents("http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline/{$username}.{$format}")); // get tweets and decode them into a variable
        $latestTweet = $tweet[0]->text; // copy the text element from the latest tweet[0] to var $latestTweet
        $latestTweet = str_replace("\"","",$latestTweet);  // remove speech marks from tweets as this closes the alt tag
    ?>

Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

$latestTweet =
  preg_replace('/@(\w+)/',
               '<a href="http://www.twitter.com/$1" target="_blank" class="green">@$1</a>',
               $latestTweet);

Answer 2

Try this:

<?php

$username = 'benpaton';
$format = 'json';
$tweet = json_decode(file_get_contents("http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline/{$username}.{$format}"));
$latestTweet = htmlentities($tweet[0]->text, ENT_QUOTES);
$latestTweet = preg_replace('/@([a-z0-9_]+)/i', '<a href="http://twitter.com/$1" target="_blank" class="green">@$1</a>', $latestTweet);
echo $latestTweet;

?>

The preg_replace will handle the link writing, the htmlentities() will encode quotation marks so they should be able to be included in your output without breaking anything.