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Asked: 2026-06-17T23:53:55+00:00

I have a .Net Regex expression that extracts all valid looking Urls from a

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I have a .Net Regex expression that extracts all valid looking Urls from a string. It passes all 20 of my unit tests except one: when the Url contains a questionmark. This causes the Regex engine to hang the process and wreak havoc.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time on this expression, but I’m unsure how to fix the issue. Hopefully a Regex pro out there can lend a hand! Two part question:

1) How can this regex pattern be improved so it does not hang when evaluating string “http://www.example.com/?a=1“:

Regex pattern:

(?<URL>(\s|^)((?<Scheme>[A-Za-z]{3,9})[:][/][/])?([A-Za-z0-9-]+[.])+([A-Za-z]+){2,4}(?(Scheme)|[/])(((?:[\+~%\/.\w-_]*[/]?)?\??#?(?:[\w]*))?)*(\s|$))

I would suggest using this awesome online .Net Regex testing engine: http://regexhero.net/tester/

2) What can I do in my calling code to prevent/recover from Regex engine hangups? Here’s the calling code:

        Regex linkParser = new Regex(UrlMatchRegex, RegexOptions.Compiled | RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);

        // Find matches and add them to the result
        foreach (Match m in linkParser.Matches(message))
        {
            result.Add(m.Value.Trim());
        }

I’ve spent quite a bit of time on this particular Regex pattern, and have tried at least 7 alternates I’ve found (including most from this page: http://mathiasbynens.be/demo/url-regex). I would prefer to improve on my existing pattern, rather than use an entirely different one, but I’m open to options.

Final Regex v1:

After a few revisions, with some help from below, my final regex match looks like this:

(?<URL>((?<=\s)|^)((?<Scheme>[A-Za-z]{3,9})[:][/][/])?([A-Za-z0-9-]+[.])+[A-Za-z]{2,4}(?(Scheme)|[/]?)(((?:[\+~%\/.\w-_]*[/]?)?\??#?&?(?:[\w=]*))?)*((?=\s)|$))

**Regex v2: Updated to include a set list of domains, port numbers, hashtags, but does not pull in trailing slashes

(?<URL>((?<=\b)|^)((?<Scheme>[A-Za-z]{3,9})[:][/][/])?([A-Za-z0-9-]+[.])+((?<TLD>\b(aero|asia|biz|cat|com|coop|edu|gov|info|int|jobs|mil|mobi|museum|name|net|org|pro|tel|travel|ac|ad|ae|af|ag|ai|al|am|an|ao|aq|ar|as|at|au|aw|ax|az|ba|bb|bd|be|bf|bg|bh|bi|bj|bm|bn|bo|br|bs|bt|bv|bw|by|bz|ca|cc|cd|cf|cg|ch|ci|ck|cl|cm|cn|co|cr|cu|cv|cx|cy|cz|cz|de|dj|dk|dm|do|dz|ec|ee|eg|er|es|et|eu|fi|fj|fk|fm|fo|fr|ga|gb|gd|ge|gf|gg|gh|gi|gl|gm|gn|gp|gq|gr|gs|gt|gu|gw|gy|hk|hm|hn|hr|ht|hu|id|ie|il|im|in|io|iq|ir|is|it|je|jm|jo|jp|ke|kg|kh|ki|km|kn|kp|kr|kw|ky|kz|la|lb|lc|li|lk|lr|ls|lt|lu|lv|ly|ma|mc|md|me|mg|mh|mk|ml|mn|mn|mo|mp|mr|ms|mt|mu|mv|mw|mx|my|mz|na|nc|ne|nf|ng|ni|nl|no|np|nr|nu|nz|nom|pa|pe|pf|pg|ph|pk|pl|pm|pn|pr|ps|pt|pw|py|qa|re|ra|rs|ru|rw|sa|sb|sc|sd|se|sg|sh|si|sj|sj|sk|sl|sm|sn|so|sr|st|su|sv|sy|sz|tc|td|tf|tg|th|tj|tk|tl|tm|tn|to|tp|tr|tt|tv|tw|tz|ua|ug|uk|us|uy|uz|va|vc|ve|vg|vi|vn|vu|wf|ws|ye|yt|yu|za|zm|zw|arpa)\b))+(\/?)+((((?:[:\+~%/.\w-_\/])?[\?]?[#]?[&]?(?:[\w=]*))?)+(?=\?|\b)))

Test cases:
this is a test of #

Should not match:

like when you a/b test something
this sentence ends with a/
just a #hashtag

Should match:

sos.me extra
sos.me. extra <-- not period
sos.me, extra <-- not comma
sos.me/ extra <-- should match traililng /
sos.me/#hashtag? extra <-- not questionmark
sos.me? extra <-- not questionmark
www.sos.me? extra <-- not questionmark
sos.me/abcde extra
sos.me/abcde#hashtag extra
sos.me/abcdf/0 extra
sos.me/abcdf/0#hashtag extra
sos.me/something.aspx extra
sos.me/something.aspx#hashtag extra
http://something.com: extra <-- not colon
sos.me/something.aspx?name=value extra
sos.me/something.aspx?name=value#hashtag extra
http://something.com extra
https://something.com extra
http://something.com:80 extra
http://something.com:80/ extra <-- should match trailing /
http://something.com:80/?a=v&1=2 extra
http://something.com:80/?a=v&1=2#hashtag extra
http://something.com:80/?a=v&1=2# extra <-- should match trailing #
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    QUESTION 1

    This is causing catastrophic backtracking:

    ([A-Za-z]+){2,4}

    And:

    [\+~%\/.\w-_]*[/]?

    I’m guessing you meant:

    ([A-Za-z]{2,4})

    And:

    [\+~%\/.\w-_]*

    Your regex does not currently match URLs with equal signs, which is why the catastrophic backtracking happens in the first place:

    \??#?(?:[\w]*)

    does not match ‘?a = 1′ because \w does not include ‘=’. You can fix this pretty easily:

    \??#?(?:[\w=%]*)

    (I threw ‘%’ in there too)

    Also, your regex is matching the whitespace before and after your URL. You may prefer lookarounds to \s as this will match a position before or after whitespace rather than the whitespace itself:

    (?<URL>((?<=\s)|^)((?<Scheme>[A-Za-z]{3,9})[:][/][/])?([A-Za-z0-9-]+[.])+[A-Za-z]{2,4}(?(Scheme)|[/])(((?:[\+~%\/.\w-_]*[/]?)?\??#?(?:[\w=]*))?)*((?=\s)|$))

    QUESTION 2

    There’s nothing you can do to detect or recover from a catastrophically backtracking regular expression. The best you could try is spinning the regex off into an independent thread and then terminating the thread after a certain timeout. Exactly how to do that would be an entirely different question, but it’s not difficult to find tutorials online for .NET.

    See:

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