Detect URLs in text with JavaScript

Question

Does anyone have suggestions for detecting URLs in a set of strings?

arrayOfStrings.forEach(function(string){
  // detect URLs in strings and do something sw         


        

Answer 1

Generic Object Oriented Solution

For people like me that use frameworks like angular that don't allow manipulating DOM directly, I created a function that takes a string and returns an array of url/plainText objects that can be used to create any UI representation that you want.

URL regex

For URL matching I used (slightly adapted) h0mayun regex: /(?:(?:https?:\/\/)|(?:www\.))[^\s]+/g

My function also drops punctuation characters from the end of a URL like . and , that I believe more often will be actual punctuation than a legit URL ending (but it could be! This is not rigorous science as other answers explain well) For that I apply the following regex onto matched URLs /^(.+?)([.,?!'"]*)$/.

Typescript code

    export function urlMatcherInText(inputString: string): UrlMatcherResult[] {
        if (! inputString) return [];

        const results: UrlMatcherResult[] = [];

        function addText(text: string) {
            if (! text) return;

            const result = new UrlMatcherResult();
            result.type = 'text';
            result.value = text;
            results.push(result);
        }

        function addUrl(url: string) {
            if (! url) return;

            const result = new UrlMatcherResult();
            result.type = 'url';
            result.value = url;
            results.push(result);
        }

        const findUrlRegex = /(?:(?:https?:\/\/)|(?:www\.))[^\s]+/g;
        const cleanUrlRegex = /^(.+?)([.,?!'"]*)$/;

        let match: RegExpExecArray;
        let indexOfStartOfString = 0;

        do {
            match = findUrlRegex.exec(inputString);

            if (match) {
                const text = inputString.substr(indexOfStartOfString, match.index - indexOfStartOfString);
                addText(text);

                var dirtyUrl = match[0];
                var urlDirtyMatch = cleanUrlRegex.exec(dirtyUrl);
                addUrl(urlDirtyMatch[1]);
                addText(urlDirtyMatch[2]);

                indexOfStartOfString = match.index + dirtyUrl.length;
            }
        }
        while (match);

        const remainingText = inputString.substr(indexOfStartOfString, inputString.length - indexOfStartOfString);
        addText(remainingText);

        return results;
    }

    export class UrlMatcherResult {
        public type: 'url' | 'text'
        public value: string
    }