bbp_make_clickable() doesn't handle spaces in linked text, and incorrectly duplicates `<a>`

[dd32]

As reported in ​https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/3998

<a href="https://codex.wordpress.org/Roles and Capabilities">https://codex.wordpress.org/Roles and Capabilities</a>

turns into:

<a href="https://codex.wordpress.org/Roles and Capabilities" rel="nofollow"></a><a href="https://codex.wordpress.org/Roles" rel="nofollow">https://codex.wordpress.org/Roles</a> and Capabilities

Looks like either make_clickable() or bbp_make_clickable() is trying to make the URL clickable without taking the existing <a> tag into account.

As I've commented on the ticket:

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This is a problem in bbp_make_clickable(), but is also present in make_clickable().

Given the input string of <a href="https://codex.wordpress.org/Roles and Capabilities">https://codex.wordpress.org/Roles and Capabilities</a> both will return the invalid output.

Both contain the following to correct it:

return preg_replace( '#(<a([ \r\n\t]+[^>]+?>|>))<a [^>]+?>([^>]+?)</a></a>#i', "$1$3</a>", $r );

But as the resulting HTML is the following it's not matched (due to the </a></a> - which assumes that neither the linked text never has spaces or isn't a URL)

<a href="https://codex.wordpress.org/Roles and Capabilities"><a href="https://codex.wordpress.org/Roles" rel="nofollow">https://codex.wordpress.org/Roles</a> and Capabilities</a>

Adjusting the regular expression to the following does work however:

return preg_replace( '#(<a([ \r\n\t]+[^>]+?>|>))<a [^>]+?>([^>]+?)</a>([^<]*)</a>#i', "$1$3$4</a>", $r );

As a work around, you can remove the spaces from the linked text, which avoids it:
<a href="https://codex.wordpress.org/Roles and Capabilities">https://codex.wordpress.org/Roles&nbsp;and&nbsp;Capabilities</a>.

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I've also created ​https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/45702