May 2009
Intermediate to advanced
510 pages
15h
English
Content preview from Regular Expressions Cookbook
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7.5. Turn URLs into Links
Problem
You have a body of text that may contain one or more URLs. You want to convert the URLs that it contains into links by placing HTML anchor tags around the URLs. The URL itself will be both the destination for the link and the text being linked.
Solution
To find the URLs in the text, use one of the regular expressions from Recipes 7.2 or 7.4. As the replacement text, use:
<a●href="$&">$&</a>| Replacement text flavors: .NET, JavaScript, Perl |
<a●href="$0">$0</a>| Replacement text flavors: .NET, Java, PHP |
<a●href="\0">\0</a>| Replacement text flavors: PHP, Ruby |
<a●href="\&">\&</a>| Replacement text flavor: Ruby |
<a●href="\g<0>">\g<0></a>| Replacement text flavor: Python |
When programming, you can implement this search-and-replace as explained in Recipe 3.15.
Discussion
The solution to this problem is very straightforward. We use a
regular expression to match a URL, and then replace it with «<a●href="»,
where URL">URL</a>URL represents the URL that we
matched. Different programming languages use different syntax for the
replacement text, hence the long list of solutions to this problem.
But they all do exactly the same thing. Recipe 2.20 explains the replacement text
syntax.
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.