Removing url from text using ruby

Question

Given a text, I want to remove the url part and leave other text.

Example:

'bla bla bla... bla bla bla... http://bit.ly/someuri bla bla bla...'

to become

'bla bla bla... bla bla bla... bla bla bla...'

Is there any ruby build in method to do this efficiently?

The text is entered by user, so my main concern is just remove anything that resembles a url up to the next space. 'http://bit.ly/the url with space' will become 'url with space' — Donny Kurnia
– Donny Kurnia, Commented Jun 16, 2011 at 8:06

The Mask · Accepted Answer · 2011-06-16 07:50:30Z

9

Try with regex:

(?:f|ht)tps?:\/[^\s]+

answered Jun 16, 2011 at 7:50

The Mask

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2 Comments

Dhruva Sagar Over a year ago

@Donny Kurnia lets say you have your string in a variable str, then you can use @The Mask's regex like so : new_str = str.gsub(/(?:f|ht)tps?:\/[^\s]+/, '') or if you want str itself to change you can do str.gsub!(/(?:f|ht)tps?:\/[^\s]+/, '')

Satchel Over a year ago

@DhruvaSagar the answer above worked where mine failed. @inbound_text.gsub!(/<http:(.*)>/m, ''). Why? Nice answer.

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 12:01:52Z

4

I just found Regular Expression - replace word except within a URL/URI and modify the code to be like this:

URI_REGEX = %r"((?:(?:[^ :/?#]+):)(?://(?:[^ /?#]*))(?:[^ ?#]*)(?:\?(?:[^ #]*))?(?:#(?:[^ ]*))?)"

def remove_uris(text)
  text.split(URI_REGEX).collect do |s|
    unless s =~ URI_REGEX
      s
    end
  end.join
end

I test it in rails console and it worked as expected:

remove_uris('bla bla bla... bla bla bla... http://bit.ly/someuri bla bla bla...')
=> "bla bla bla... bla bla bla...  bla bla bla..."

If anyone have better / effective solution, I will vote up or accept it. Thanks.

edited May 23, 2017 at 12:01

CommunityBot

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answered Jun 16, 2011 at 7:59

Donny Kurnia

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2 Comments

nex Over a year ago

what about text.gsub!(URI_REGEX, '') ?

mreq Over a year ago

Please note that this doesn't work 100%. Consider the following text:

"تفاصيل تغطية\n#lexusriyadhlargestglobally\n#لكزس_الرياض_الأكبر_في_العالم\nتجدونها هنا👇\nhttp://example.com\n👏👌👍 http://example.com"

some parts of the arabic text and emojis are left out

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