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

When you say "body of text" do you mean a plain text file, or body text in an HTML document? If you want the HTML document, you will want to use Beautiful Soup to parse it; then, search through the body text and insert the tags.

Matching the actual URLs is probably best done with the urlparse module. Full discussion here: How do you validate a URL with a regular expression in Python?