C# code to linkify urls in a string

Question

Does anyone have any good c# code (and regular expressions) that will parse a string and \"linkify\" any urls that may be in the string?

Answer 1

It's not that easy as you can read in this blog post by Jeff Atwood. It's especially hard to detect where an URL ends.

For example, is the trailing parenthesis part of the URL or not:

• http​://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCTools(CentralPointSoftware)
• an URL in parentheses (http​://en.wikipedia.org) more text

In the first case, the parentheses are part of the URL. In the second case they are not!