Javascript regular expression question

Question

I'm using javascript regex to do the following:

I have the html content of a page saved inside a string, and I want to match all URLs on the page.

For example, if the document contains--

<script src = "http://www.a.com">
<a href="http://www.b.com">
<a href= "http://www.c.com">
<a href ="http://www.d.com">

I want the match to be--

http://www.a.com
http://www.b.com
http://www.c.com
http://www.d.com

Any help would be appreciated, thanks!

Are your url's really that simple, or will they contain parameters or longer paths? — Hemlock
– Hemlock, Commented Jan 10, 2011 at 1:53
@Hello71 I have done as you have asked, I have parsed the HTML with HTML5 Lib, I have fetched all the links, I have fixed all the encoding bugs, all the unknown unsupported unicode symbols and finally after weeks of work got those links from that html. Was it worth it? Maybe. Is the added complexity worth it? No it is not, parsing HTML is a lot harder than you think, HTML can contain other types of content and is extremely complicated, regex matching links might actually be the better answer here... that or a custom parser (which I also tried, great for really long texts). — Timo Huovinen
– Timo Huovinen, Commented Aug 5, 2014 at 9:37

soren121 · Accepted Answer · 2011-01-10 02:02:52Z

2

John Gruber has an excellent regex for URLs over at his site, Daring Fireball: http://daringfireball.net/2010/07/improved_regex_for_matching_urls

You can implement it like so:

function regex(url) {
    var regex = /(?i)\b((?:https?://|www\d{0,3}[.]|[a-z0-9.\-]+[.][a-z]{2,4}/)(?:[^\s()<>]+|\(([^\s()<>]+|(\([^\s()<>]+\)))*\))+(?:\(([^\s()<>]+|(\([^\s()<>]+\)))*\)|[^\s`!()\[\]{};:'".,<>?«»“”‘’]))/
    return regex.test(url);
}

answered Jan 10, 2011 at 2:02

soren121

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2 Comments

Dominic K Over a year ago

I get an error of misplaced | with that code - this gist works well: gist.github.com/1033143. It uses the same regex.

Timo Huovinen Over a year ago

Matches URLs not links/anchors which is not exactly the same

angularconsulting.au · Accepted Answer · 2011-01-10 01:52:00Z

0

function isUrl(url) {
    var regexp = /(http|https):\/\/(\w+:{0,1}\w*@)?(\S+)(:[0-9]+)?(\/|\/([\w#!:.?+=&%@!\-\/]))?/
    return regexp.test(url);
}

It is a bit more generic, but you may modify it for your needs.

answered Jan 10, 2011 at 1:52

angularconsulting.au

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