Implementing String.Tweetify in MooTools

By  on  
TwitterGitter

Twitter has damn near taken over the world. Everything's Twitter. Twitter this. Twitter that. TwitterGitter. Twitter everything. I'm more used to reading Twitter-speak (short condensed sentences, #'s, @'s, etc.) now than I am plain English. And since Twitter is only going to continue to get more popular, we better get used to using it on our websites and providing users with formatted tweets. MooTools makes it easy to format tweets with links.

The MooTools JavaScript

//implement
String.implement({
	tweetify: function() {
		return this.replace(/(https?:\/\/\S+)/gi,'<a href="$1">$1</a>').replace(/(^|\s)@(\w+)/g,'$1<a href="http://twitter.com/$2">@$2</a>').replace(/(^|\s)#(\w+)/g,'$1<a href="http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23$2">#$2</a>');
	}
});
//usage
var original = '@davidwalshblog I love your #Mootools LazyLoad plugin!  https://davidwalsh.name/lazyload';
var tweetified = original.tweetify(); //becomes: <a href="http://twitter.com/davidwalshblog">@davidwalshblog</a> I love your <a href="http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23Mootools">#Mootools</a> LazyLoad plugin! <a href="https://davidwalsh.name/lazyload">https://davidwalsh.name/lazyload </a>

Now you can instantly tweetify any string!

Recent Features

  • By
    Designing for Simplicity

    Before we get started, it's worth me spending a brief moment introducing myself to you. My name is Mark (or @integralist if Twitter happens to be your communication tool of choice) and I currently work for BBC News in London England as a principal engineer/tech...

  • By
    How I Stopped WordPress Comment Spam

    I love almost every part of being a tech blogger:  learning, preaching, bantering, researching.  The one part about blogging that I absolutely loathe:  dealing with SPAM comments.  For the past two years, my blog has registered 8,000+ SPAM comments per day.  PER DAY.  Bloating my database...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Hot Effect: MooTools Drag Opacity

    As you should already know, the best visual features of a website are usually held within the most subtle of details. One simple trick that usually makes a big different is the use of opacity and fading. Another awesome MooTools functionality is...

  • By
    MooTools Zebra Table Plugin

    I released my first MooTools class over a year ago. It was a really minimalistic approach to zebra tables and a great first class to write. I took some time to update and improve the class. The XHTML You may have as many tables as...

Discussion

  1. I think this example is not usefull only for twittify but is a good practice to show and teach how to extend in our architecture every Object.

    Changing our prospective of OOP developer we can imagine to transform our objects and give them a bit of intelligence like languages like Ruby do, for example :)

  2. That right there is glorious. Love it.

  3. Ororok Orebuk

    You can do the same with String.prototype.tweetify=function(){ ... };

  4. How would you do this in php or jQuery?

  5. Darkimmortal

    Doesn’t extending native objects in Javascript screw things up?

    Or is that another myth?

  6. @Sean: jQuery doesn’t lend itself as well to this. I started creating a jQuery version and got frustrated and gave up. I may try again.

    @Darkimmortal: Myth. Definitely a myth.

  7. Nice thing – could be useful for a javascript “tweet this” button implementation.

  8. Here is dentify for using with identi.ca and other laconica / statusnet servers:

    String.implement({
        dentify: function(server) {
            return this.replace(/(https?:\/\/\S+)/gi,'<a href="$1">$1</a>'
                      ).replace(/(^|\s)@(\w+)/g,
                          '$1<a href="'+server+'/$2">@$2</a>'
                      ).replace(/(^|\s)#(\w+)/g,
                          '$1<a href="'+server+
                          '/search/notice?q=%23$2&search=Search">#$2</a>'
                      ).replace(/(^|\s)!(\w+)/g,
                          '$1<a href="'+server+
                          '/search/group?q=%23$2&search=Search">#$2</a>');
        }
    });
    

    You will have to give it a “server” string like “http://identi.ca”.

    I used it for my identi.ca / twitter widget

    Big THX again for this useful thing!

  9. Sorry for double posting – had to change the one line:
    (too much copy paste – forgot to put a “!” instead of “#” and killed the “%23”)
    this works correct:

        String.implement({
        dentify: function(server) {
        return this.replace(/(https?:\/\/\S+)/gi,’$1’
        ).replace(/(^|\s)@(\w+)/g,
        ‘$1@$2’
        ).replace(/(^|\s)#(\w+)/g,
        ‘$1#$2’
        ).replace(/(^|\s)!(\w+)/g,
        ‘$1!$2’);
        }
        });
  10. Good article but it would be smarter to prototype the javascript String object like Ororok said. Then you don’t need any extra javascript framework.

  11. nice trick , yesterday i was making a twitter widget profile using mootools and i got my self confused on how to make tweets wel-formatted on mootools ??
    this wat u used before

    var status = twitters[i].text.replace(/((https?|s?ftp|ssh)\:\/\/[^"\s\]*[^.,;'">\:\s\\)\]\!])/g, function(url) {
          return ''+url+'';
        }).replace(/\B@([_a-z0-9]+)/ig, function(reply) {
          return  reply.charAt(0)+''+reply.substring(1)+'';
        });
    

    Thanks.

  12. Abby Torrendon

    Hi, I just want to make a request, could you make a blank demo page of this code? I was trying to figure the codes out (kinda newbie in MooTools) and I would like to add this to my school project (my prof wants us to make a sample portfolio site). Thanks in advance.

  13. Abby Torrendon

    By the way, I’m currently using MooTools 1.2, but the code won’t mess up if I’m using the old version, right?

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!