How to match URIs in text?

Question

How would one go about spotting URIs in a block of text?

The idea is to turn such runs of texts into links. This is pretty simple to do if one only considered the ht

Answer 1

Whether or not something is a URI is context-dependent. In general the only thing they always have in common is that they start "scheme_name:". The scheme name can be anything (subject to legal characters). But other strings also contain colons without being URIs.

So you need to decide what schemes you're interested in. Generally you can get away with searching for "scheme_name:", followed by characters up to a space, for each scheme you care about. Unfortunately URIs can contain spaces, so if they're embedded in text they are potentially ambiguous. There's nothing you can do to resolve the ambiguity - the person who wrote the text would have to fix it. URIs can optionally be enclosed in <>. Most people don't do that, though, so recognising that format will only occasionally help.

The Wikipedia article for URI lists the relevant RFCs.

[Edit to add: using regular expressions to fully validate URIs is a nightmare - even if you somehow find or create one that's correct, it will be very large and difficult to comment and maintain. Fortunately, if all you're doing is highlighting links, you probably don't care about the odd false positive, so you don't need to validate. Just look for "http://", "mailto:\S*@", etc]