regex to find url in a text

Question

I have to find the first url in the text with a regular expression:

for example:

I love this website:http://www.youtube.com/music it\'s fantastic
         


        

Answer 1

I looked into this issue last year and developed a solution that you may want to look at - See: URL Linkification (HTTP/FTP) This link is a test page for the Javascript solution with many examples of difficult-to-linkify URLs.

My regex solution, written for both PHP and Javascript - is not simple (but neither is the problem as it turns out.) For more information I would recommend also reading:

The Problem With URLs by Jeff Atwood, and
An Improved Liberal, Accurate Regex Pattern for Matching URLs by John Gruber

The comments following Jeff's blog post are a must read if you want to do this right...

Note that this question gets asked a lot. Maybe do a search next time :)