Regex - removing a final period from a hyperlink

Hello!
I am using some regular expressions that automatically turn URLs into hyperlinkgs (with the <a href= blah blah). The problem that I am having is that i find many times people on my site are adding a period to the end of a URL if used at the end of a sentance (Using correct grammar of course). For example:
Http://www.somesite.com/index.html.

so naturally it comes out like this

<a href="http://www.somesite.com/index.html.">http://www.somesite.com/index.html.</a>

the dot on the end (most of the time) causes an error 404.

basically, how can i get rid of the period on the end if its there?

Im thinking about using another eregi_replace to remove periods from the end of urls, or put a space in between the url and . or something. But i cant figure out how to do that.

heres my current code:

function makeURL($string){

  //make URL's a clickable Hyperlink (beginning with http or ftp ://)
  $string = eregi_replace('([[:space:]()[{}])(((f|ht){1}tp://)[-a-zA-Z0-9@:%_\+.~#?&//=]+)',    '\\1<a href="\\2" target="_blank">\\2</a>', $string);  
  //make URL's a clickable Hyperlink (beginning with www.)
  $string = eregi_replace('([[:space:]()[{}])(www.[-a-zA-Z0-9@:%_\+.~#?&//=]+)',    '\\1<a href="http://\\2" target="blank">\\2</a>', $string);  

  //make Email Address a clickable Hyperlink  
  $string = eregi_replace('([_\.0-9a-z-]+@([0-9a-z][0-9a-z-]+\.)+[a-z]{2,3})',    '<a href="mailto:\\1">\\1</a>', $string);  
  
  return $string;

}

Code (php):

any help is appreciated.

 

maybe this simple code is fine for you?

str_replace(".\">", "\">", $string);

Code (markup):

 

The first 2 replacements can be combined:

$string = eregi_replace('([[:space:]()[{}])((((f|ht){1}tp://)|www.)[-a-zA-Z0-9@:%_\+.~#?&//=]+[-a-zA-Z0-9@%_\+~#&//=])',    '\\1<a href="http://\\2" target="blank">\\2</a>', $string);

PHP:

That also fixes your problem. pruad's solution would work but this way also prevents problems with other characters, such as a question mark or a closing bracket and doesn't involve another replace.

Here is the same code with a bit of cleanup:

$string = eregi_replace('([[:space:]()[{}])((((f|ht)tp://)|www.)[-a-zA-Z0-9@:%_\+.~#?&/=]+[-a-zA-Z0-9@%_\+~#&/=])',    '\\1<a href="http://\\2" target="blank">\\2</a>', $string);

PHP:

Also, look around code for other forums or apps that do this to make such regex patterns, it seems you are just reinventing the wheel. And it will take a long time for that to be perfected, try getting this to work on it for example:

Go here:https://example.com

 

thanks a million, thats just what i needed.