regex replace urls with anchors ONLY if not already in anchors

Question

I\'ve seen similar questions asked before, but none with a working solution.

I am trying to replace all urls on a page with anchor tags, but only those which aren\'t alr

Answer 1

If you are doing it on the client-side it might be worth doing it by walking document tree

Look through text nodes (nodeName="#text") and if there is substring starting with http/https and parent tag is not A - replace it with pattern (\1 etc)

consider this to start

 // getting all tags where there is a text with 'http' which are not links
 var textTags = [].slice.call(document.getElementsByTagName('*'))
        .filter(function(n) { 
               return !n.children.length 
                  && n.nodeName !='A' && n.nodeName !='INPUT' 
                  && (n.innerHTML.indexOf('http') > -1) })

 for(var i in textTags) {
   // your code to replace links with whatever you want
 }