replace URLs in text with links to URLs

Question

Using Python I want to replace all URLs in a body of text with links to those URLs, like what Gmail does. Can this be done in a one liner regular expression?

Edit: b

Answer 1

I hunted around a lot, tried these solutions and was not happy with their readability or features, so I rolled the following:

_urlfinderregex = re.compile(r'http([^\.\s]+\.[^\.\s]*)+[^\.\s]{2,}')

def linkify(text, maxlinklength):
    def replacewithlink(matchobj):
        url = matchobj.group(0)
        text = unicode(url)
        if text.startswith('http://'):
            text = text.replace('http://', '', 1)
        elif text.startswith('https://'):
            text = text.replace('https://', '', 1)

        if text.startswith('www.'):
            text = text.replace('www.', '', 1)

        if len(text) > maxlinklength:
            halflength = maxlinklength / 2
            text = text[0:halflength] + '...' + text[len(text) - halflength:]

        return '' + text + ''

    if text != None and text != '':
        return _urlfinderregex.sub(replacewithlink, text)
    else:
        return ''

You'll need to get a link out image, but that's pretty easy. This is specifically for user submitted text like comments which I assume is usually what people are dealing with.