How to detect and remove URLs a sentence?

Question

Is it possible to detect and remove any kind of URLs in a sentence?

For example:

Today,wheather is cold.But I want to out. http://weathers.com..... And I will take a cup of tea...

should become

Today,wheather is cold.But I want to out. And I will take a cup of tea...

Use a regex. Answer here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/833469/regular-expression-for-url#answer-8234912 — BackSlash, Jul 01 '13 at 15:20
define **any kind of urls** pls. `https://? file:///? ftp://? scp://? smb://.. ... ?` — Kent, Jul 01 '13 at 15:21
https://? file:///? ftp://? scp://? smb://,...and also shorted urls that usually use on twitter — reigeki, Jul 01 '13 at 15:29

score 3 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 10:32

3

It depends on how comprehensive you want the matching process to be. You can try using something as simple as

str.replaceAll("http://[^\\s]+", "")

e.g.

System.out.println("Today,wheather is cold.But I want to out. "
        + "http://weathers.com..... And I will take a cup of tea..."
        .replaceAll("http://[^\\s]+", ""));

Today,wheather is cold.But I want to out.  And I will take a cup of tea...

If you want something more robust to match valid URLs, use a fuller URL regular expression:

/^(https?:\/\/)?([\da-z\.-]+)\.([a-z\.]{2,6})([\/\w \.-]*)*\/?$/

For even more thorough matching, refer to this answer.

edited May 23 '17 at 10:32

Community

1
1

answered Jul 01 '13 at 15:19

arshajii

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The real URL (IRI) seems more complicate http://stackoverflow.com/a/190405/2040040 – johnchen902 Jul 01 '13 at 15:26
@johnchen902 Yes, I referenced that question in the answer, thanks. – arshajii Jul 01 '13 at 15:28

Sazzadur Rahaman · Answer 2 · 2013-07-01T15:40:44.473

Try out the bellow regular expression

((http|ftp|https):\/\/)?[\w\-_]+(\.[\w\-_]+)+([\w\-\.,@?^=%&amp;:/~\+#]*[\w\-\@?^=%&amp;/~\+#])?

for matching your valid URL and the following code should do, what you want:

    String str = "Today,wheather is cold. But I want to out. http://weathers.com..... And I will take a cup of tea";
    String regularExpression = "(((http|ftp|https):\\/\\/)?[\\w\\-_]+(\\.[\\w\\-_]+)+([\\w\\-\\.,@?^=%&amp;:/~\\+#]*[\\w\\-\\@?^=%&amp;/~\\+#])?)";
    str = str.replaceAll(regularExpression,"");
    System.out.println(str);

Edit:

However this regular expression will not work for all types of URL's, because its too much complicated and hard to find the perfect regular expressions to match all types of URL.

How to detect and remove URLs a sentence?

2 Answers2