If the text is a simple markup and has existing anchors, stage the existing anchor tags first, swap out the urls, then replace the staged markers.
$text = '
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text found by searching http://google.com/?q=lorem in your <a href=https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/>Firefox</a>,
<a href="https://www.apple.com/safari/">Safari</a>, or https://www.google.com/chrome/ browser.
Link replacements will first stage existing anchor tags, replace each with a marker, then swap out the remaining links.
Links should be properly encoded. If links are not separated from surrounding content like a trailing "." period then they it will be included in the link.
Links that are not encoded properly may create a problem, so best to use this when you know the text you are processing is not mixed HTML.
Example: http://google.com/i,m,complicate--d/index.html
Example: https://www.google.com/chrome/?123&t=123
Example: http://google.com/?q='. urlencode('<a href="http://google.com">http://google.com</a>') .'
';
// Replace existing links with a marker
$linkStore = array();
$text = preg_replace_callback('/(<a.*?a>)/', function($match) use (&$linkStore){ $key = '__linkStore'.count($linkStore).'__'; $linkStore[$key] = $match[0]; return $key; }, $text);
// Replace remaining URLs with an anchor tag
$text = preg_replace_callback("/(http|https|ftp|ftps)\:\/\/[a-zA-Z0-9\-\.]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,3}(\/\S*)?/", function($match) use (&$linkStore){ return '<a href="'. $match[0] .'">'. $match[0] .'</a>'; }, $text);
// Replace link markers with original
$text = str_replace(array_keys($linkStore), array_values($linkStore), $text);
echo '<pre>'.$text;