preg_replace limit issue, handling array values

Question

I've been working with the Sphider search engine for an internal website, we need to be able to quickly search for contact details in exported .htm(l) files.

$fulltxt = ereg_replace("[_A-Za-z0-9-]+(\.[_A-Za-z0-9-]+)*@[A-Za-z0-9-]+(\.[A-Za-z0-9-]+)*(\.[A-Za-z]{2,3})", "<a href=\"mailto:\\0\">\\0</a>", $fulltxt);

I am replacing e-mail addresses with a convenient mailto: link so users can open Outlook straight from the search results.

However,

while (preg_match("/[^\>](".$change.")[^\<]/i", " ".$fulltxt." ", $regs)) {
    $fulltxt = preg_replace("/".$regs[1]."/i", "<b>".$regs[1]."</b>", $fulltxt);
    }

It replaces all matches in the search results with bold tags, which resuts into the tags been included in Outlook's 'To...' field. It looks something like this in HTML (thanks Yuriy ):

<a href="mailto:<b>name</b>.surname@domain"><b>name</b>.surname@domain</a>

I have tried adding a value to the 'limit' parameter:

while (preg_match("/[^\>](".$change.")[^\<]/i", " ".$fulltxt." ", $regs)) {
    $fulltxt = preg_replace("/".$regs[1]."/i", "<b>".$regs[1]."</b>", $fulltxt, 1);
    }

Supposingly this should be the solution to my problem by simply replacing only the first occurrence (being the name as the pattern is name-phone num-email and we always search by name ), instead it only makes it incredibly slow to the point i get a timeout message from the server. I've been trying various solutions but have been out of luck.

Any ideas? Am i doing something wrong?

Thanks.

(*Original heavily edited).

Answer 1

Did I understand you right that something like this happens?

<a href="mailto:<b>email@domain</b>"><b>email@domain</b></a>

Why don't you put tags into search results first, and only then apply "mailto:" anchors to emails? Added 's would be easy to filter out in the patter on that second step.