How to replace plain URLs with links, with example? [duplicate]

Answer 1

Over at CodeReview this question was answered quite splendidly.

function replaceURLWithHTMLLinks(text) {
    var re = /(\(.*?)?\b((?:https?|ftp|file):\/\/[-a-z0-9+&@#\/%?=~_()|!:,.;]*[-a-z0-9+&@#\/%=~_()|])/ig;
    return text.replace(re, function(match, lParens, url) {
        var rParens = '';
        lParens = lParens || '';

        // Try to strip the same number of right parens from url
        // as there are left parens.  Here, lParenCounter must be
        // a RegExp object.  You cannot use a literal
        //     while (/\(/g.exec(lParens)) { ... }
        // because an object is needed to store the lastIndex state.
        var lParenCounter = /\(/g;
        while (lParenCounter.exec(lParens)) {
            var m;
            // We want m[1] to be greedy, unless a period precedes the
            // right parenthesis.  These tests cannot be simplified as
            //     /(.*)(\.?\).*)/.exec(url)
            // because if (.*) is greedy then \.? never gets a chance.
            if (m = /(.*)(\.\).*)/.exec(url) ||
                    /(.*)(\).*)/.exec(url)) {
                url = m[1];
                rParens = m[2] + rParens;
            }
        }
        return lParens + "" + url + "" + rParens;
    });
}

Note: I had errors with the "@" symbol in the "var re" - I just replaced it with @@