jQuery Text to Link Script?

Elijah_Manor_4481 0
Viewed 41961

Does anyone know of a script that can select all text references to URLs and automatically replace them with anchor tags pointing to those locations?

For example:

http://www.google.com 

would automatically turn into

<a href="http://www.google.com">http://www.google.com</a>

Note: I am wanting this because I don't want to go through all my content and wrap them with anchor tags.

anchor html jquery javascript
7 Answers

NOTE: An updated and corrected version of this script is now available at https://github.com/maranomynet/linkify (GPL/MIT licence)

Hmm... to me this seems like the perfect task for jQuery.

...something like this came off the top of my mind:

// Define: Linkify plugin
(function($){

  var url1 = /(^|&lt;|\s)(www\..+?\..+?)(\s|&gt;|$)/g,
      url2 = /(^|&lt;|\s)(((https?|ftp):\/\/|mailto:).+?)(\s|&gt;|$)/g,

      linkifyThis = function () {
        var childNodes = this.childNodes,
            i = childNodes.length;
        while(i--)
        {
          var n = childNodes[i];
          if (n.nodeType == 3) {
            var html = $.trim(n.nodeValue);
            if (html)
            {
              html = html.replace(/&/g, '&amp;')
                         .replace(/</g, '&lt;')
                         .replace(/>/g, '&gt;')
                         .replace(url1, '$1<a href="http://$2">$2</a>$3')
                         .replace(url2, '$1<a href="$2">$2</a>$5');
              $(n).after(html).remove();
            }
          }
          else if (n.nodeType == 1  &&  !/^(a|button|textarea)$/i.test(n.tagName)) {
            linkifyThis.call(n);
          }
        }
      };

  $.fn.linkify = function () {
    return this.each(linkifyThis);
  };

})(jQuery);

// Usage example:
jQuery('div.textbody').linkify();

It attempts to turn all occurrences of the following into links:

  • www.example.com/path
  • http://www.example.com/path
  • mailto:me@example.com
  • ftp://www.server.com/path
  • ...all of the above wrapped in angle brackets (i.e. <...>)

Enjoy :-)

M225r_162710

JQuery isn't going to help you a whole lot here as you're not really concerned with DOM traversal/manipulation (other than creating the anchor tag). If all your URLs were in <p class="url"> tags then perhaps.

A vanilla JavaScript solution is probably what you want, and as fate would have it, this guy should have you covered.

Pseudo_Masochist_85290

I suggest you do this on your static pages before rendering to the browser, or you'll be pushing the burden of conversion computation onto your poor visitors. :) Here's how you might do it in Ruby (reading from stdin, writing to stdout):

while line = gets
  puts line.gsub( /(^|[^"'])(http\S+)/, "\\1<a href='\\2'>\\2</a>" )
end

Obviously, you'll want to think about how to make this as robust as you desire. The above requires all URLs to start with http, and will check not to convert URLs that are in quotes (i.e. which may already be inside an <a href="...">). It will not catch ftp://, mailto:. It will happily convert material in places like <script> bodies, which you may not want to happen.

The most satisfactory solution is really to do the conversion by hand with your editor so you can eyeball and approve all substitutions. A good editor will let you do regexp substitution with group references (aka back references), so it shouldn't be a big deal.

Pistos_285580

If you want a solution from another perspective... if you can run the pages through php and HTML Purifier, it can autoformat the output and linkify any urls.

DGM_142530
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