Question

hi all
i have a string text that may contains urls (this text is got from a form text area)
and i want to detect those urls and surrounds them with the tag so that they will be represented in html page as links
what is the best way of doing that ?

Answer 1

use regular expressions.

(?i)\b((?:[a-z][\w-]+:(?:/{1,3}|[a-z0-9%])|www\d{0,3}[.]|[a-z0-9.\-]+[.][a-z]{2,4}/)(?:[^\s()<>]+|\(([^\s()<>]+|(\([^\s()<>]+\)))*\))+(?:\(([^\s()<>]+|(\([^\s()<>]+\)))*\)|[^\s`!()\[\]{};:'".,<>?«»“”‘’]))

look here from more information
http://daringfireball.net/2010/07/improved_regex_for_matching_urls

    public boolean isURL(String s){
    return s.matches(" (?i)\b((?:[a-z][\w-]+:(?:/{1,3}|[a-z0-9%])|www\d{0,3}[.]|[a-z0-9.\-]+[.][a-z]{2,4}/)(?:[^\s()<>]+|\(([^\s()<>]+|(\([^\s()<>]+\)))*\))+(?:\(([^\s()<>]+|(\([^\s()<>]+\)))*\)|[^\s`!()\[\]{};:\'\".,<>?«»\“\”\‘\’]))");
}