How turn text links into HTML links at the client side with javascript

Question

In my db I have saved every links in the form:

www.example.com or http://www.example.com

Is there a way to turn this text links into HTML links at the client side ( e.g. javascript ) with tag and parameter like this ?:

<a href="http://www.example.com" rel="nofollow">www.example.com</a>

Answer 1

This would probably be smarter to do on the server side like cherouvim suggested, but here's a (naive) javascript function that does this for the specified formats (url with and without http://-prefix)

    function makeLink(link) { 
        var url, desc;

        if (link.match('^http://')) {
            url = link;
            desc = link.substr(7, link.length - 7);
        } else {
            url = 'http://' + link;
            desc = link;
        }

        return '<a href="' + url + '" rel="nofollow">' + desc + '</a>';
    }

Please note it doesn't handle unexpected input (https...) very well, so please don't use as-is in production environment :)

Answer 2

I would try it like this:

text.replace(/([A-Za-z]+:\/\/)?[A-Za-z0-9-_]+\.[A-Za-z0-9-_:%&\?\/.=]+/, function(url) {
return url.link(url);
})