How to replace plain URLs with links?

Question

I am using the function below to match URLs inside a given text and replace them for HTML links. The regular expression is working great, but currently I am only replacing t

Answer 1

I've made some small modifications to Travis's code (just to avoid any unnecessary redeclaration - but it's working great for my needs, so nice job!):

function linkify(inputText) {
    var replacedText, replacePattern1, replacePattern2, replacePattern3;

    //URLs starting with http://, https://, or ftp://
    replacePattern1 = /(\b(https?|ftp):\/\/[-A-Z0-9+&@#\/%?=~_|!:,.;]*[-A-Z0-9+&@#\/%=~_|])/gim;
    replacedText = inputText.replace(replacePattern1, '$1');

    //URLs starting with "www." (without // before it, or it'd re-link the ones done above).
    replacePattern2 = /(^|[^\/])(www\.[\S]+(\b|$))/gim;
    replacedText = replacedText.replace(replacePattern2, '$1$2');

    //Change email addresses to mailto:: links.
    replacePattern3 = /(([a-zA-Z0-9\-\_\.])+@[a-zA-Z\_]+?(\.[a-zA-Z]{2,6})+)/gim;
    replacedText = replacedText.replace(replacePattern3, '$1');

    return replacedText;
}