Does anyone have suggestions for detecting URLs in a set of strings?
arrayOfStrings.forEach(function(string){
// detect URLs in strings and do something swell,
// like creating elements with links.
});
Update: I wound up using this regex for link detection… Apparently several years later.
kLINK_DETECTION_REGEX = /(([a-z]+:\/\/)?(([a-z0-9\-]+\.)+([a-z]{2}|aero|arpa|biz|com|coop|edu|gov|info|int|jobs|mil|museum|name|nato|net|org|pro|travel|local|internal))(:[0-9]{1,5})?(\/[a-z0-9_\-\.~]+)*(\/([a-z0-9_\-\.]*)(\?[a-z0-9+_\-\.%=&]*)?)?(#[a-zA-Z0-9!$&'()*+.=-_~:@/?]*)?)(\s+|$)/gi
The full helper (with optional Handlebars support) is at gist #1654670.
First you need a good regex that matches urls. This is hard to do. See here, here and here:
...almost anything is a valid URL. There are some punctuation rules for splitting it up. Absent any punctuation, you still have a valid URL.
Check the RFC carefully and see if you can construct an "invalid" URL. The rules are very flexible.
For example
:::::
is a valid URL. The path is":::::"
. A pretty stupid filename, but a valid filename.Also,
/////
is a valid URL. The netloc ("hostname") is""
. The path is"///"
. Again, stupid. Also valid. This URL normalizes to"///"
which is the equivalent.Something like
"bad://///worse/////"
is perfectly valid. Dumb but valid.
Anyway, this answer is not meant to give you the best regex but rather a proof of how to do the string wrapping inside the text, with JavaScript.
OK so lets just use this one: /(https?:\/\/[^\s]+)/g
Again, this is a bad regex. It will have many false positives. However it's good enough for this example.
function urlify(text) {
var urlRegex = /(https?:\/\/[^\s]+)/g;
return text.replace(urlRegex, function(url) {
return '<a href="' + url + '">' + url + '</a>';
})
// or alternatively
// return text.replace(urlRegex, '<a href="$1">$1</a>')
}
var text = 'Find me at http://www.example.com and also at http://stackoverflow.com';
var html = urlify(text);
console.log(html)
// html now looks like:
// "Find me at <a href="http://www.example.com">http://www.example.com</a> and also at <a href="http://stackoverflow.com">http://stackoverflow.com</a>"
So in sum try:
$$('#pad dl dd').each(function(element) {
element.innerHTML = urlify(element.innerHTML);
});