Regular expression to find URLs within a string

Question

This is the one I use

(http|ftp|https):\/\/([\w_-]+(?:(?:\.[\w_-]+)+))([\w.,@?^=%&:\/~+#-]*[\w@?^=%&\/~+#-])

Works for me, should work for you too.

Guess no regex is perfect for this use. I found a pretty solid one here

/(?:(?:https?|ftp|file):\/\/|www\.|ftp\.)(?:\([-A-Z0-9+&@#\/%=~_|$?!:,.]*\)|[-A-Z0-9+&@#\/%=~_|$?!:,.])*(?:\([-A-Z0-9+&@#\/%=~_|$?!:,.]*\)|[A-Z0-9+&@#\/%=~_|$])/igm

Some differences / advantages compared to the other ones posted here:

• It does not match email addresses
• It does match localhost:12345
• It won't detect something like moo.com without http or www

See here for examples

text = """The link of this question: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6038061/regular-expression-to-find-urls-within-a-string
Also there are some urls: www.google.com, facebook.com, http://test.com/method?param=wasd, http://test.com/method?param=wasd&params2=kjhdkjshd
The code below catches all urls in text and returns urls in list."""

urls = re.findall('(?:(?:https?|ftp):\/\/)?[\w/\-?=%.]+\.[\w/\-&?=%.]+', text)
print(urls)

Output:

[
    'https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6038061/regular-expression-to-find-urls-within-a-string', 
    'www.google.com', 
    'facebook.com',
    'http://test.com/method?param=wasd',
    'http://test.com/method?param=wasd&params2=kjhdkjshd'
]

None of the solutions provided here solved the problems/use-cases I had.

What I have provided here, is the best I have found/made so far. I will update it when I find new edge-cases that it doesn't handle.

\b
  #Word cannot begin with special characters
  (?<![@.,%&#-])
  #Protocols are optional, but take them with us if they are present
  (?<protocol>\w{2,10}:\/\/)?
  #Domains have to be of a length of 1 chars or greater
  ((?:\w|\&\#\d{1,5};)[.-]?)+
  #The domain ending has to be between 2 to 15 characters
  (\.([a-z]{2,15})
       #If no domain ending we want a port, only if a protocol is specified
       |(?(protocol)(?:\:\d{1,6})|(?!)))
\b
#Word cannot end with @ (made to catch emails)
(?![@])
#We accept any number of slugs, given we have a char after the slash
(\/)?
#If we have endings like ?=fds include the ending
(?:([\w\d\?\-=#:%@&.;])+(?:\/(?:([\w\d\?\-=#:%@&;.])+))*)?
#The last char cannot be one of these symbols .,?!,- exclude these
(?<![.,?!-])

Wrote one up myself:

let regex = /([\w+]+\:\/\/)?([\w\d-]+\.)*[\w-]+[\.\:]\w+([\/\?\=\&\#\.]?[\w-]+)*\/?/gm

It works on ALL of the following domains:

https://www.facebook.com
https://app-1.number123.com
http://facebook.com
ftp://facebook.com
http://localhost:3000
localhost:3000/
unitedkingdomurl.co.uk
this.is.a.url.com/its/still=going?wow
shop.facebook.org
app.number123.com
app1.number123.com
app-1.numbEr123.com
app.dashes-dash.com
www.facebook.com
facebook.com
fb.com/hello_123
fb.com/hel-lo
fb.com/hello/goodbye
fb.com/hello/goodbye?okay
fb.com/hello/goodbye?okay=alright
Hello www.google.com World http://yahoo.com
https://www.google.com.tr/admin/subPage?qs1=sss1&qs2=sss2&qs3=sss3#Services
https://google.com.tr/test/subPage?qs1=sss1&qs2=sss2&qs3=sss3#Services
http://google.com/test/subPage?qs1=sss1&qs2=sss2&qs3=sss3#Services
ftp://google.com/test/subPage?qs1=sss1&qs2=sss2&qs3=sss3#Services
www.google.com.tr/test/subPage?qs1=sss1&qs2=sss2&qs3=sss3#Services
www.google.com/test/subPage?qs1=sss1&qs2=sss2&qs3=sss3#Services
drive.google.com/test/subPage?qs1=sss1&qs2=sss2&qs3=sss3#Services
https://www.example.pl
http://www.example.com
www.example.pl
example.com
http://blog.example.com
http://www.example.com/product
http://www.example.com/products?id=1&page=2
http://www.example.com#up
http://255.255.255.255
255.255.255.255
shop.facebook.org/derf.html

You can see how it performs here on regex101 and adjust as needed