Question

I have this at the moment, (I found the code on here).

     var exp = /(\b(https?|ftp|file):\/\/[-A-Z0-9+&@#\/%?=~_|!:,.;]*[-A-Z0-9+&@#\/%=~_|])/ig;
     someText.replace(exp, "<a href='$1'>$1</a>");  

It will replace any http://URL in someText with a proper <a href>

But i also require it to match www. without the http. I found this RegEx on RegEx Lib.

((http\://|https\://|ftp\://)|(www.))+(([a-zA-Z0-9\.-]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,4})|([0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}))(/[a-zA-Z0-9%:/-_\?\.'~]*)?

And i tested in on the RegEx checker site, http://www.nvcc.edu/home/drodgers/ceu/resources/test_regexp.asp

It matches the strings i want. But when i put it into my exp var, JavaScript is blowing up and causing an error.

I even tried newing it up as a new RegExp like so.

var exp = new RegExp(((http\://|https\://|ftp\://)|(www.))+(([a-zA-Z0-9\.-]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,4})|([0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}))(/[a-zA-Z0-9%:/-_\?\.'~]*)?);

But the same thing happens.

Any ideas what i am doing wrong?

Thanks,
Kohan

Answer 1

I believe the RegExp constructor takes a string as argument, see here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Core_JavaScript_1.5_Reference/Global_Objects/RegExp

So just put quotes around your regexp and it should work fine.

var exp = new RegExp("((http\\://|https\\://|ftp\\://)|(www.))+(([a-zA-Z0-9\\.-]+\\.[a-zA-Z]{2,4})|([0-9]{1,3}\\.[0-9]{1,3}\\.[0-9]{1,3}\\.[0-9]{1,3}))(/[a-zA-Z0-9%:/-_\\?\\.'~]*)?");
someText.replace(exp, "<a href='$1'>$1</a>");