Question

I’m currently working on a project where we want to limit the amount of characters a user can enter.
So far this is working, javascript is used for front-end detection, and on the back-end the string is shortened why a user disabled js.

The only problem are links, we don’t want to count links as characters as they will be shortened anyway.
Now I’m looking for a way to quickly detect links, find the lenght of that link and ignore it.

The js for it is pretty simple:

var currentLength = $(parent).find('textarea').val().length;
var remaining = max - currentLength;

if(remaining <= 0) {
    $(parent).find('textarea').val($(parent).find('textarea').val().substr(0, max));
    remaining = 0;
}

Anybody that can point me in the right direction on how to do this?
Maybe something with regular expressions?

Answer 1

var urlRegex = /(https?:\/\/[^\s]+)/g;
return text.replace(urlRegex, '');

See Detect URLs in text with JavaScript