Useful Wordpress filter snippet for automatically finding Twitter handles in your content and formatting them as a link with Twitter Web Intents and Fontawesome icons

fb_format_twitter_handle

<?php 
/**
 * How this works: While writing content in the Wordpress editor. Simply add a twitter handle without a link but with the @ symbol.
 * EG: "Here is some content written by @FredBradley" would turn into "Here is some content written by <i class="fa fa-fw fa-twitter"></i><a href="https://twitter.com/intent/user/?screen_name=@FredBradley">@FredBradley</a>"
 * 
 * Notes: For this snippet to work 100% as intended it requires two things. 
 * 1. You need to have Font Awesome working on your site. (http://fontawesome.io/)
 * 2. You need to have called the Twitter Widgets.js javascript for Web Intents to work. More details here: https://dev.twitter.com/web/intents#user-intent
 * 
 * How to implement: Simply add this snippet into your theme's functions.php file! 
 */

function fb_format_twitter_handle($content) {
    $pattern= '/(?<=^|(?<=[^a-zA-Z0-9-_\.]))@([A-Za-z]+[A-Za-z0-9_]+)/i';
    $replace= '<i class="fa fa-fw fa-twitter"></i><a href="https://twitter.com/intent/user/?screen_name=$1">@$1</a>';
    $content= preg_replace($pattern, $replace, $content);
    return $content;
}
 
add_filter( "the_content", "fb_format_twitter_handle" );
?>