Question

I am trying to take a string of text and create an array from it so that the string:

var someText='I am some text and check this out!  http://blah.tld/foo/bar  Oh yeah! look at this too: http://foobar.baz';

insert magical regex here and

the array would look like this:

theArray[0]='I am some text and check this out!  '
theArray[1]='http://blah.tld/foo/bar'
theArray[2]='  Oh yeah! look at this too: '
theArray[3]='http://foobar.baz'

I’m at a loss, any help would greatly be appreciated

–Eric

Answer 1

Split by URL regex (thanks to @Pullet for pointing out a flaw here):

var urlPattern = /(https?\:\/\/\S+[^\.\s+])/;
someText.split(urlPattern);

Let’s break down the regex 🙂

(https?    -> has "http", and an optional "s"
\:\/\/     -> followed by ://
\S+        -> followed by "contiguous" non-whitespace characters (\S+)
[^\.\s+])  -> *except* the first ".", or a series of whitespace characters (\s+)

Running through your sample text gives,

["I am some text and check this out!  ",
"http://blah.tld/foo/bar",
"  Oh yeah! look at this too: ",
"http://foobar.baz",
""]