Question

I am using Ruby on Rails 3.0.7 and I would like to “exctract” from a string (or a text) all links present in that.

At this time I have the following regex* in order to match URL and e-mail addresses:

/((\S+)?(@|mailto\:)|((ht|f)tp(s?)\:\/\/)|([www]))\S+/

If I have the following string:

text here http://www.sitename.com and text here www.sitename.com and text here [e-mail] and text here

I would like to get an array (or some other data structure) populated of links present in the above string.

How can I do?

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*BTW: Is the regex “good” enough?

Answer 1

Maybe something like this:

text = 'text here http://www.sitename.com and text here www.sitename.com and text here [e-mail] and text here'
links = []
text.split.each do |word|
  links << word if word.match(/(((\S+)?)((@|mailto\:)|(((ht|f)tp(s?))\:\/\/)|([www]))\S+)/)
end
puts links