regex - Find Hyperlinks in Text using Python (twitter related)

13
votes

How can I parse text and find all instances of hyperlinks with a string? The hyperlink will not be in the html format of <a href="http://test.com">test</a> but just http://test.com

Secondly, I would like to then convert the original string and replace all instances of hyperlinks into clickable html hyperlinks.

I found an example in this thread:

Easiest way to convert a URL to a hyperlink in a C# string?

but was unable to reproduce it in python :(

4
pythonregex
You should use example.com for example URLs. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Example.com - John Fouhy
Thanks John! I did not know that those are official example domains. - Dan Rosenstark
See: stackoverflow.com/questions/9760588/… - Paolo Rovelli

4 Answers

23
votes

Here's a Python port of Easiest way to convert a URL to a hyperlink in a C# string?:

import re

myString = "This is my tweet check it out http://tinyurl.com/blah"

r = re.compile(r"(http://[^ ]+)")
print r.sub(r'<a href="\1">\1</a>', myString)

Output:

This is my tweet check it out <a href="http://tinyurl.com/blah">http://tinyurl.com/blah</a>
10
votes

Here is a much more sophisticated regexp from 2002.

5
votes

Django also has a solution that doesn't just use regex. It is django.utils.html.urlize(). I found this to be very helpful, especially if you happen to be using django.

You can also extract the code to use in your own project.

2
votes

Jinja2 (Flask uses this) has a filter urlize which does the same.

Docs