How to differentiate a link from text?

Question

I have lines of text and I have to find whether these lines contain some link . how can I do it?Firstly I thought of finding www in the text but some links might not have www . Secondly I thought of finding http in text but again all links do not contain http. what to do?

Isn't it that a link has to have either of them in most text programs? (www or http) You could just use both for filtering then. — ben, Jun 06 '14 at 00:33

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 06 '14 at 00:56

Here is a regexp adapted from http://mathiasbynens.be/demo/url-regex entry by @diegoperini (Ruby syntax; you might need to change some details like Unicode \uXXXX to whatever your system uses):

(?:(?:https?|ftp):\/\/)?(?:\S+(?::\S*)?@)?(?:(?!10(?:\.\d{1,3}){3})(?!127(?:\.\d{1,3}){3})(?!169\.254(?:\.\d{1,3}){2})(?!192\.168(?:\.\d{1,3}){2})(?!172\.(?:1[6-9]|2\d|3[0-1])(?:\.\d{1,3}){2})(?:[1-9]\d?|1\d\d|2[01]\d|22[0-3])(?:\.(?:1?\d{1,2}|2[0-4]\d|25[0-5])){2}(?:\.(?:[1-9]\d?|1\d\d|2[0-4]\d|25[0-4]))|(?:(?:[a-z\u00a1-\uffff0-9]+-?)*[a-z\u00a1-\uffff0-9]+)(?:\.(?:[a-z\u00a1-\uffff0-9]+-?)*[a-z\u00a1-\uffff0-9]+)*(?:\.(?:[a-z\u00a1-\uffff]{2,})))(?::\d{2,5})?(?:\/[^\s]*)?

How to differentiate a link from text?

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