Regular expression to find URLs within a string

Question

Does anyone know of a regular expression I could use to find URLs within a string? I\'ve found a lot of regular expressions on Google for determining if an entire string is

Answer 1

A probably too simplistic, but working method might be:

[localhost|http|https|ftp|file]+://[\w\S(\.|:|/)]+

I tested it on Python and as long as the string parsing contains a space before and after and none in the url (which I have never seen before) it should be fine.

Here is an online ide demonstrating it

However here are some benefits of using it:

• It recognises file: and localhost as well as ip addresses
• It will never match without them
• It does not mind unusual characters such as # or - (see url of this post)