Regular expression to find URLs within a string

Question

Does anyone know of a regular expression I could use to find URLs within a string? I\'ve found a lot of regular expressions on Google for determining if an entire string is

Answer 1

This is a slight improvement on/adjustment to (depending on what you need) Rajeev's answer:

([\w\-_]+(?:(?:\.|\s*\[dot\]\s*[A-Z\-_]+)+))([A-Z\-\.,@?^=%&:/~\+#]*[A-Z\-\@?^=%&/~\+#]){2,6}?

See here for an example of what it does and does not match.

I got rid of the check for "http" etc as I wanted to catch url's without this. I added slightly to the regex to catch some obfuscated urls (i.e. where user's use [dot] instead of a "."). Finally I replaced "\w" with "A-Z" to and "{2,3}" to reduce false positives like v2.0 and "moo.0dd".

Any improvements on this welcome.