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Answer 1

+1 A:

Off the top of my head I would run a regular expression to match a link pattern and throw the anchor tags around it.

Found this on google:

using System.Text.RegularExpressions; 

public string ConvertURLsToHyperlinks(string sInput) 
{ 
    return Regex.Replace(sInput, @"(\bhttp://[^ ]+\b)", @"<a href=""$0"">$0</a>"); 
}

It looks for "http://" followed by anything that's not a space, separated by word boundaries.

Kevin 2010-09-30 14:57:03

This will work in the example stated in the question, but many URLs in the real world end in a slash (`/`) or other punctuation characters and your regex wouldn’t match that.

Timwi 2010-09-30 15:06:39

This didnt work actually. I copied the RegEx from the link Kevin gave and that worked - Regex.Replace(sInput, @"(\bhttp://[^ ]+\b)", @"<a href=""$0"">$0</a>");

Jon 2010-09-30 15:12:47

@Timwi - how can we modify the Regex to fix it?

Jon 2010-09-30 15:16:04

Just make sure you don't convert URLs of the form `http://t.co/@"onmouseover=`

dtb 2010-09-30 15:19:22

@Timwi - it seems fine with a slash on the end

Jon 2010-09-30 18:56:30

@Jon: No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t linkify the slash. (And other punctuation characters.)

Timwi 2010-09-30 19:05:12

Well spotted. How can we fix this?

Jon 2010-10-01 08:10:32

adding the literal `"` to the `[^ ]` group should take care of that.

Kevin 2010-10-01 16:41:38

Answer 2

+1 A:

i believe there is no such helper method but u can create one

public static class helper{
public static string AnchorHelper(this htmlHelper helper, string text)
{
   //here u can use kevin's function to generate anchors
   return ConvertURLsToHyperlinks(text);  
}
}

you have to add corresponding namespace in ur view and then u can just use it like other html helpers

<%=Html.AnchorHelper(TextwithUrls)%>

Muhammad Adeel Zahid 2010-09-30 15:02:12

The class needs to be marked `static` for extension methods to be permitted in it.

Timwi 2010-09-30 15:07:50

@Timwi thanks for correction. updated the answer

Muhammad Adeel Zahid 2010-09-30 15:17:27

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