Extracting URLs from a text document using Java + Regular Expressions

Question

I\'m trying to create a regular expression to extract URLs from text documents using Java, but thus far I\'ve been unsuccessful. The two cases I\'m looking to capture are li

Answer 1

If you want to make sure you are really matching a url adress and not only some word starting with 'www.' you can use the expression mentioned by DVK before. I modified it slightly and wrote a small code snippet to be a starting point for you:

import java.util.*;
import java.util.regex.*;

class FindUrls
{
    public static List extractUrls(String input) {
        List result = new ArrayList();

        Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile(
            "\\b(((ht|f)tp(s?)\\:\\/\\/|~\\/|\\/)|www.)" + 
            "(\\w+:\\w+@)?(([-\\w]+\\.)+(com|org|net|gov" + 
            "|mil|biz|info|mobi|name|aero|jobs|museum" + 
            "|travel|[a-z]{2}))(:[\\d]{1,5})?" + 
            "(((\\/([-\\w~!$+|.,=]|%[a-f\\d]{2})+)+|\\/)+|\\?|#)?" + 
            "((\\?([-\\w~!$+|.,*:]|%[a-f\\d{2}])+=?" + 
            "([-\\w~!$+|.,*:=]|%[a-f\\d]{2})*)" + 
            "(&(?:[-\\w~!$+|.,*:]|%[a-f\\d{2}])+=?" + 
            "([-\\w~!$+|.,*:=]|%[a-f\\d]{2})*)*)*" + 
            "(#([-\\w~!$+|.,*:=]|%[a-f\\d]{2})*)?\\b");

        Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(input);
        while (matcher.find()) {
            result.add(matcher.group());
        }

        return result;
    }
}