Question

I need a Javascript regular expression that scans a block of plain text and returns the text with the URLs as links.

This is what i have:

findLinks: function(s) {
          var hlink = /\s(ht|f)tp:\/\/([^ \,\;\:\!\)\(\"\'\\f\n\r\t\v])+/g;
          return (s.replace(hlink, function($0, $1, $2) {
              s = $0.substring(1, $0.length);
              while (s.length > 0 && s.charAt(s.length - 1) == '.') s = s.substring(0, s.length - 1);

              return ' ' + s + '';
          }));
      }

the problem is that it will only match http://www.google.com
and NOT google.com/adsense

How could I accomplish both?

Answer 1

I use this a as reference all the time. This guy has 8 regex’s you should know.

http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/other/8-regular-expressions-you-should-know/

Here is what he uses to look for URL’s

/^(https?:\/\/)?([\da-z\.-]+)\.([a-z\.]{2,6})([\/\w \.-]*)*\/?$/ 

He also breaks down what each part does. Very useful for learning regex’s and not just getting an answer that works for reasons you don’t understand.