Leverage the filter system, convert plain text URLs into links in drupal.

Posted by: 
Dominique De Cooman
On: 
Wednesday, February 27, 2013 - 10:13

This small post will explain how you can leverage the filter system to apply it to external data:

  • Convert plain text URLs into links in drupal.
  • Limit allowed HTML tags
  • Convert line breaks into HTML
  • Correct faulty and chopped off HTML

You can call every filter from code if you want to. Let us say that you have a custom ds field that is pulling data (html) from somewhere.

<?php
    // Use the database we set up earlier
    db_set_active('db_integration');

    // Get your data
    //OutputWordScanner by cid, tid and source to get the test name and words. Display like "test: words"    
    $field = 'field_' . $node->type . '_tid';
    $results = db_query("SELECT * FROM {CustomOutputSuggestor} WHERE cid  = :cid AND source = :source AND tid = :tid", array(
      ':cid' => $account->field_cid['und'][0]['value'],
      ':source' => str_replace('tender_', '', $node->type),
      ':tid' => $node->{$field}['und'][0]['value'],
        )
        )->fetchAll();

    // Go back to the default database,
    db_set_active();

    //Process the results from the query
    module_load_include('module', 'filter', 'filter');
    $filter = new stdClass();
    $filter->settings = array(
      'filter_url_length' => 80,
    );
    foreach ($results as $result) {      
      $data .= '<div class="suggestion-test-suggestion">' . _filter_url($result->suggestions, $filter) . '</div>';
    }
    // Save result of the data to the cache
    $expire = time() + variable_get('db_expire_time', 3600);
    cache_set($user->uid . '-' . $node->nid . '-' . 'suggestion', $data, 'cache_tests', $expire);
?>

The data that we are pulling contains links so we want those links to be formatted correctly. This you can do by using the snippet:

<?php
      module_load_include('module', 'filter', 'filter');
      $filter = new stdClass();
      $filter->settings = array(
        'filter_url_length' => 80,
      );
     _filter_url($result->suggestions, $filter)
?>

The snippet creates a class with settings and then executes the filter_url filter to filter the results for urls to convert.

You can do this for every filter. For example you want to:

  • limit allowed HTML tags? You can create a setting with the allowed tags and have it filter.
  • You want to chop of faulty html? A common problem when importing html from other sources.

Add new comment