Extract URLs from text in PHP

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?

Probably the safest way is using code snippets from WordPress. Download the latest one (currently 3.1.1) and see wp-includes/formatting.php. There's a function named make_clickable which has plain text for param and returns formatted string. You can grab codes for extracting URLs. It's pretty complex though.

This one line regex might be helpful.

preg_match_all('#\bhttps?://[^\s()<>]+(?:\([\w\d]+\)|([^[:punct:]\s]|/))#', $string, $match);

But this regex still can't remove some malformed URLs (ex. http://google:ha.ckers.org ).

See also: How to mimic StackOverflow Auto-Link Behavior

I tried to do as Nobu said, using Wordpress, but to much dependencies to other WordPress functions I instead opted to use Nobu's regular expression for preg_match_all() and turned it into a function, using preg_replace_callback(); a function which now replaces all links in a text with clickable links. It uses anonymous functions so you'll need PHP 5.3 or you may rewrite the code to use an ordinary function instead.

<?php 

/**
 * Make clickable links from URLs in text.
 */

function make_clickable($text) {
    $regex = '#\bhttps?://[^\s()<>]+(?:\([\w\d]+\)|([^[:punct:]\s]|/))#';
    return preg_replace_callback($regex, function ($matches) {
        return "<a href=\'{$matches[0]}\'>{$matches[0]}</a>";
    }, $text);
}