How to replace plain URLs with links?

Question

I am using the function below to match URLs inside a given text and replace them for HTML links. The regular expression is working great, but currently I am only replacing t

Answer 1

Made some optimizations to Travis' Linkify() code above. I also fixed a bug where email addresses with subdomain type formats would not be matched (i.e. example@domain.co.uk).

In addition, I changed the implementation to prototype the String class so that items can be matched like so:

var text = 'address@example.com';
text.linkify();

'http://stackoverflow.com/'.linkify();

Anyway, here's the script:

if(!String.linkify) {
    String.prototype.linkify = function() {

        // http://, https://, ftp://
        var urlPattern = /\b(?:https?|ftp):\/\/[a-z0-9-+&@#\/%?=~_|!:,.;]*[a-z0-9-+&@#\/%=~_|]/gim;

        // www. sans http:// or https://
        var pseudoUrlPattern = /(^|[^\/])(www\.[\S]+(\b|$))/gim;

        // Email addresses
        var emailAddressPattern = /[\w.]+@[a-zA-Z_-]+?(?:\.[a-zA-Z]{2,6})+/gim;

        return this
            .replace(urlPattern, '$&')
            .replace(pseudoUrlPattern, '$1$2')
            .replace(emailAddressPattern, '$&');
    };
}