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

This solution works like many of the others, and in fact uses the same regex as one of them, however in stead of returning a HTML String this will return a document fragment containing the A element and any applicable text nodes.

 function make_link(string) {
    var words = string.split(' '),
        ret = document.createDocumentFragment();
    for (var i = 0, l = words.length; i < l; i++) {
        if (words[i].match(/[-a-zA-Z0-9@:%_\+.~#?&//=]{2,256}\.[a-z]{2,4}\b(\/[-a-zA-Z0-9@:%_\+.~#?&//=]*)?/gi)) {
            var elm = document.createElement('a');
            elm.href = words[i];
            elm.textContent = words[i];
            if (ret.childNodes.length > 0) {
                ret.lastChild.textContent += ' ';
            }
            ret.appendChild(elm);
        } else {
            if (ret.lastChild && ret.lastChild.nodeType === 3) {
                ret.lastChild.textContent += ' ' + words[i];
            } else {
                ret.appendChild(document.createTextNode(' ' + words[i]));
            }
        }
    }
    return ret;
}

There are some caveats, namely with older IE and textContent support.

here is a demo.