Greasemonkey Hacks

Hack #13. Turn Naked URLs into Hyperlinks

Make every URL clickable.

Have you ever visited a page that displayed a naked URL that you couldn't click? That is, the URL is displayed as plain text on the page, and you need to manually copy the text and paste it into a new browser window to follow the link. I run into this problem all the time while reading weblogs, because many weblog publishing systems allow readers to submit comments (including URLs) but just display the comment verbatim without checking whether the comment includes a naked URL. This hack turns all such URLs into clickable links.

The Code

This user script runs on all pages. To ensure that it does not affect URLs that are already linked, it uses an XPath query that includes not(ancestor::a). To ensure that it does affect URLs in uppercase, the XPath query also includes "contains(translate(., 'HTTP', 'http'), 'http')]".

Once we find a text node that definitely contains an unlinked URL, there could be more than one URL within it, so we need to convert all the URLs while keeping the surrounding text intact. We replace the text with an empty <span> element as a placeholder and then incrementally reinsert each non-URL text snippet and each constructed URL link.

Save the following user script as linkify.user.js:

	// ==UserScript==
	// @name		  Linkify
	// @namespace	  http://youngpup.net/userscripts
	// @description   Turn plain-text URLs into hyperlinks // @include * // ==/UserScript== // based on code by Aaron Boodman // and included ...