Regular Expression to convert URI to HTML link tag

Question

I'm trying to create a method that takes an input string and converts any URIs found in the string to a html link tag.
For example,
String input = "This is a test string.  I like http://www.sun.com/ and think you should check out http://java.sun.com/"; The output should contain an html a tag for each URI and use the URI as the text as well.
I need this for a blogging web app i'm working on.
I tried a few things like
import java.util.regex.*;
import java.text.*;
public class test
     public static void main(String[] args)
          final Pattern p = Pattern.compile("(\\sI\\n|^)(\\w+://[^\\s\\n]+)");
        final Matcher m = p.matcher(args[0]);
          System.out.println(args[0]);
          args[0] = m.replaceAll( "$1<a href=\"$2\">$2</a>");
          System.out.println(args[0]);
}Any ideas? Something like this will match "http://www.apple.com/" but not a complex string. I've googled this quite a bit and I'm not very good with regular expressions.

Answer 1

Couldn't get your posted regex to work on anything. Try this:public static void main(String[] args) {
    String input = "This is a test string.  I like http://www.sun.com/ and think you should check out http://java.sun.com/";
    final Pattern p = Pattern.compile("(\\s|^)(\\w+://\\S+)(\\s|$)");
    final Matcher m = p.matcher(input);
    input = m.replaceAll("$1<a href=\"$2\">$2</a>$3");
    System.out.println(input);
}It should match any uri, however I recommend replacing \\w+ with a more concrete string like (?:(?:http)|(?:https)|(?:ftp)). Let me know if you have a uri that it doesn't match.