Question

So Gruber’s regex is fantastic for finding URLs inside text. What I’m missing is some way to turn casual-style links like bit.ly/foo into things that can go in an <a href="..."> property.

Any pointers?

Answer 1

Sometimes the simplest answer is the right one:

function canonicalise(url) {
  if (!url.match(/^[a-z][\w-]+:/i)) {
    url = 'http://' + url
  }
  return url
}