Detecting links in javascript

Question

I'm currently working on a project where we want to limit the amount of characters a user can enter. So far this is working, javascript is used for front-end detection, and on the back-end the string is shortened why a user disabled js.

The only problem are links, we don't want to count links as characters as they will be shortened anyway. Now I'm looking for a way to quickly detect links, find the lenght of that link and ignore it.

The js for it is pretty simple:

var currentLength = $(parent).find('textarea').val().length;
var remaining = max - currentLength;

if(remaining <= 0) {
    $(parent).find('textarea').val($(parent).find('textarea').val().substr(0, max));
    remaining = 0;
}

Anybody that can point me in the right direction on how to do this? Maybe something with regular expressions?

Possible duplicate of stackoverflow.com/questions/1500260/… — vzwick
– vzwick, Commented Oct 25, 2011 at 8:33
Despite an answer has been already excepted: What are you using in the back-end to recognize the link when they are being shortened? Most likely it's a regular expression, too, and most likely it should be possible to use the same regular expression (maybe adjusted for syntax differences), which would be much more reliable. — RoToRa
– RoToRa, Commented Oct 25, 2011 at 13:19
Yes, I'm using regular expressions in the back-end as well, but due to my lack of knowledge of it, I wasn't able to port it to JS. — woutr_be
– woutr_be, Commented Oct 26, 2011 at 3:17

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 12:00:50Z

1

var urlRegex = /(https?:\/\/[^\s]+)/g;
return text.replace(urlRegex, '');

See Detect URLs in text with JavaScript

edited May 23, 2017 at 12:00

CommunityBot

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answered Oct 25, 2011 at 8:33

PiTheNumber

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3 Comments

woutr_be Over a year ago

Oh thanks, I totally overlooked that one, now this regex only detects links with http in front of them. Since I'm really bad with regex, how would I also be able to detect links with www in front of it? Or even just google.com?

PiTheNumber Over a year ago

Have a look at regexlib and you will find more regexp for this than you want to know... (I hate regexp ;)

woutr_be Over a year ago

Brrrr, that site scares me ... Thanks :)

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