Question

I am using Ruby on Rails 3 and I would like to extract from a string the first URL or e-mail address and then use the resulting string (examples: “http://www.test.com“, “mailto:[e-mail]“, …) as the href attribute value used in a HTML <a href="resulting_string_value">Test link name</a>.

How can I do that in the safest way?

P.S.: I know the RoR auto_link method, but that does not accomplish what I need.

Answer 1

Ok, you probably didn’t want a regular expression, but it works, and you might use it as a helper

The code for urls:

str = "http://someurl.com/"
str.scan(/http:\/\/([^\/]*)/)

The code for emails:

str = "mailto:[e-mail]"
str.scan(/mailto:([^ ]*)/)

Putting it all together:

result_array = str.scan(/mailto:([^ ]*)|http:\/\/([^\/]*)/)
if result_array.length > 0
  result = result[0][0] unless empty? result[0][0] 
  result = result[0][1] unless empty? result[0][1] 
end