Will read it Isaac, I have re read all what Gizmo and you wrote above
I may be wrong but I think I'm also a bit right.
I have a live example here
https://www.britbike.com/forums/ubbthreads.php/topics/841074/testing-active-link#Post841074The active text setting
test555|<a href='https://britbike.com/test555'>test555</a>
test222|<a href='https://britbike.com/test222'>test222</a>
uploaded to the server is a folder "test222" and an image "test555.gif"
Within the test thread I wrote this
![[Linked Image]](https://www.ubbcentral.com/forums/ubbthreads.php/ubb/download/Number/3399/filename/Screen Shot 2021-03-01 at 15.56.18.jpg)
The result became this, what you don't see is that the urls are corrupted.
PHP doesnt care about human language. it is replacing the letter pattern as they are found.
Yes when characters like "/" or "." or "-" is in front or behind and NO when there is a letter or number.
Like the word "atest222" or "test222a" would have become links but they don't because they don't match. it starts or ends with an "a"
it is the same with "test555gif" ends with "gif" without "." in between.
![[Linked Image]](https://www.ubbcentral.com/forums/ubbthreads.php/ubb/download/Number/3398/filename/Screen Shot 2021-03-01 at 15.56.40.jpg)
I am interested in creating active links from one word only and in rare cases two words.
When I posted the test above I received one reply from a member Henry. We sent PM's to each other in order for me to understand it better.
remember I am only a user by trade..
I will include some of the conversation, Below are Henry's words. PLEASE take it for what it is a BritBike forum member trying to help me I have explained to him that UBB dev's are working on a volunteer basisHenrys words>> ...the Active Text is a powerful tool which preforms a regex match based on the keywords in your active text settings when the content is being read from the database to the user requesting the post content.
Software is typically built based on "user cases". Programmers then build and test software that conform to the user case requirements. That being said, my opinion is that the ActiveText function was built based on either a faulty user case or faulty programming of a valid use case. It is common knowledge that forum users will add links to forum posts that will be subject to be broken by the ActiveText function. This is clearly a failure of the development team. FYI, Regex is simply a set of pre-programmed text pattern recognition functions similar to many development languages.
Gizmo said >> ...we're instructing PHP to replace all matches within the post body.
Henrys reply >>>
This tells me that the PHP has been written to limit its text pattern search to the post "body" which is an HTML tag. So, if the search can be limited to <body>Content...</body>, it is pretty clear that text within a link can be excluded. This should be a simple problem for a programmer to fix. PHP has all the tools to do this with the addition of a few lines of code that set up the search conditions.
Gizmo >>
The recommendation for you is to use a more broad set of keywords...
Henry replied>>>
My recommendation is for UBB to fix the software!
UBB wrote a program in the PHP language that modifies the content of the body of the post.
Henry also wrote >>>
ActiveText is the UBB marketing name for what is commonly known as Regex. BODY is a technical term meaning the part of a web page that includes the page content the user reads. UBB has programmed the search in PHP to search only in the BODY of the page. If ActiveText searched and replaced content in other sections of the page such as HEAD, the entire page could be broken. So it stands to reason that if ActiveText can be programmed to exclude HEAD, it can be programmed to exclude links, images and any other tags. So my question asks to please explain why the search cannot be programmed do this. This explanation could be useful to help you understand the limitations of ActiveText so you can better use it to your benefit.
//Henry
If active text could be written so that it cannot not brake links, urls, images than the forum would become so much better in my opinion.
Example .. sponsors name could become a link so that it is always active text link to the sponsors site. But when the sponsor link to their images in posts it should not have to be broken..
Sorry for the ranting I simply am trying to give feedback to make it better.
Thanks for your help you know I love you all.
PS If I am totally wrong you can absolutely delete the thread.
