as3 Flex make urls from text clickable

Question

In an AIR app, I am loading a bunch of arbitrary text via JSON, loading it into an object, and displaying it via a custom renderer. I would like to have urls be clickable. So I'm sure that this is possible via some crazy regex thing (as I found for php here), but, Flex being flex, I'm astonished that there isn't some builtin functionality for this that I'm just not finding, or, failing that, a library that someone has created to do just this.

(I'm equally astonished that this question hasn't been asked here before. I anticipate being flamed with the link to that)

Failing that, anyone want to help with some crazy regex? ;>

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

You could replace the URLs in your text for actual links using the following regex:

str = str.replace(/((https?|ftp|telnet|file):((\/\/)|(\\\\))+[\w\d:#@%\/;$()~_?\+-=\\\.&]*)/g, "<u><a href='$1'>$1</a></u>");

Then set the htmlText on a Label or Text component and listen for it's link event:

<mx:Text htmlText="{str}" link="linkHandler(event)"/>

Then open the URL on the handler:

public function linkHandler(event:TextEvent):void {
    navigateToURL(new URLRequest(event.text), '_blank');
}

Except for that regex, I haven't tested this code, but it should work. Also, this could be of some help to you.

Answer 2

Thanks for this reg Ex, it saved me. +)

Answer 3

Thx leolobato for the gr8 answer. I would like to add that the following regExp could be much more useful /(((f|ht){1}tp:\/)[-a-zA-Z0-9@:%_+.~#?&\/=]+)/g for validating an URL.Thx 4 the help again.