jQuery Text to Link Script?

Question

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.

Solution 1

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.

Solution 2

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 = /(^|<|\s)(www\..+?\..+?)(\s|>|$)/g,
      url2 = /(^|<|\s)(((https?|ftp):\/\/|mailto:).+?)(\s|>|$)/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, '&')
                         .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:[email protected]
• ftp://www.server.com/path
• ...all of the above wrapped in angle brackets (i.e. <...>)

Enjoy :-)

Solution 3

I have this function i call

textToLinks: function(text) {

    var re = /(https?:\/\/(([-\w\.]+)+(:\d+)?(\/([\w/_\.]*(\?\S+)?)?)?))/g;
    return text.replace(re, "<a href=\"$1\" title=\"\">$1</a>");
  }

Solution 4

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.

Solution 5

Take a look at this JQuery plugin: https://code.google.com/p/jquery-linkifier/

View more solutions

Comments

[Már Örlygsson]

I disagree, solving this problem involves lots of DOM traversing (maybe not a lot of CSS selectors) and jQuery is a fine tool to solve this with. (See my example draft for a jQuery plugin below.)

[Már Örlygsson]

BTW, an updated and corrected version of this script is now available (GPL/MIT) at github.com/maranomynet/linkify

[panchicore]

cool!. some ideas, set attr target value in options, and attach jquery from google cdn instead local copy. very very usefull piece of js.

[John B]

I had issues with the project on GitHub in IE 7 and IE 8. So I submitted a pull request with a new regex. Thanks.

[Nathan]

Wow! Thank you so much for this! I made a little jsFiddle of this if anyone wants to see a preview of it: jsfiddle.net/NathanJohnson/gRLaV

[syntagma]

Unfortunately it doesn't work on Chrome (v27).

[Dan Dascalescu]

That plugin is very naive. It mentions no prior art, even though there are tons of URL parsing and validation libraries out there.

[Dan Dascalescu]

@MárÖrlygsson: are you still maintaining this library? Would love to include it in my roundup - see the GitHub ticket.

[Már Örlygsson]

not really. not at the moment at least

[SexyMF]

Not all the usecases are working... jsfiddle.net/npnrm8dq

[Sedat Kumcu]

Thanks for this useful source. Works fine for my project.