Ruby linkify for urls in strings

Question

There have been a few posts about linkifying text using a regex. The most popular is this post.

However my spec is a little more tricky:

describe TextFormatter do 

  def l(input) 
    TextFormatter.gsub_links!(input){|link| "!!#{link}!!"}
  end

  it "should detect simple links" do
    l("http://www.cnn.com").should == "!!http://www.cnn.com!!"
  end

  it "should detect multi links" do
    l("http://www.cnn.com http://boats.com?help.asp").should == "!!http://www.cnn.com!! !!http://boats.com?help.asp!!"
  end

  it "should compensate for parans properly" do 
    l("(http://this.is?hello_world)").should == "(!!http://this.is?hello_world!!)"
  end

  it "should ignore existing links" do 
    s = "<A HREF='http://sam.com'&gt; http://sam.com </A>"
    l(s.dup).should == s
  end

  it "should allow parans" do 
    l("http://sam.com.au?(red)").should == "!!http://sam.com.au?(red)!!"
  end

end

Any ideas how to implement the hairy Regex:

This is where I am so far (it fails 2 tests):

  def gsub_links!(input)
    regex = /https?\:\/\/[\-\w+&@#\/%?=~\(\)\|!:,.;]*[\-\w+&@#\/%=~_\(\)|]/
    input.gsub!(regex) { |link|
      yield link
    }
  end

Answer 1

I might be missing some context, but why re-invent the wheel? Have you tried auto_link in actionpack?

$ sudo gem install actionpack

$ irb -f --prompt simple
>> require 'rubygems'
>> require 'action_view'
>> include ActionView::Helpers

>> auto_link("abc http://google.com xyz")
=> "abc <a href=\"http://google.com\"&gt;http://google.com&lt;/a&gt; xyz"
>> auto_link("abc <a href='http://google.com'&gt;google&lt;/a&gt; xyz")
=> "abc <a href='http://google.com'&gt;google&lt;/a&gt; xyz"