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I'm looking for a regular expression which can extract http URIs from a file (arbitrary text). Note that text can have word "http" but that word might or might not represent a valid URI address.

UPDATE: I understand that HTML is a context free grammar while RegEx is a regular expression but are URIs are just patterns (regular expression). Or not?

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I would just like to point out, that using regex when they are not appropriate may cause madness. What you are asking for is not possible with 100% accuracy. – Zoredache Jun 7 '11 at 0:08
I understand that HTML is a context free grammar while RegEx is a regular expression but are URIs are just patterns (regular expression). Or not? – Seno Jun 7 '11 at 2:16
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@Zoredache, what are you crazy ​‽ You don’t do regex for fun? – Synetech Jun 7 '11 at 3:01
Provided that you're constraining yourself to well-formed URLs, including protocol prefixes (preferably constrained to a specific set of protocols), regexes can do a pretty good job with this (and many sites use them for just that). But 100% accuracy is still not possible because of things like "Found this at http://somesite.com/foo.", where neither regex nor context-free grammars can reliably determine whether the final "." should be part of the URL or not and the link is unlikely to work if the parser gets it wrong. – Dave Sherohman Jun 7 '11 at 8:46
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2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

It's harder than you think and no regular-expression is lightly to catch them all.
Consider urls like this

http://www.google.com/search?q=good+url+regex&rls=com.microsoft:*&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&startIndex=&startPage=1

ftp://joe:password@ftp.filetransferprotocal.com

google.ru

https://some-url.com?query=&name=joe?filter=.#some_anchor

Here is a good short article on the subject A good url regular expression?

^(?#Protocol)(?:(?:ht|f)tp(?:s?)\:\/\/|~\/|\/)?(?#Username:Password)  
(?:\w+:\w+@)?(?#Subdomains)(?:(?:[-\w]+\.)+(?#TopLevel Domains)  
(?:com|org|net|gov|mil|biz|info|mobi|name|aero|jobs|museum|travel|  
[a-z]{2}))(?#Port)(?::[\d]{1,5})?(?#Directories)(?:(?:(?:\/(?:[-\w~!$+|.,=]  
|%[a-f\d]{2})+)+|\/)+|\?|#)?(?#Query)(?:(?:\?(?:[-\w~!$+|.,*:]|%[a-f\d{2}])  
+=?(?:[-\w~!$+|.,*:=]|%[a-f\d]{2})*)(?:&(?:[-\w~!$+|.,*:]|%[a-f\d{2}])+=?  
(?:[-\w~!$+|.,*:=]|%[a-f\d]{2})*)*)*(?#Anchor)(?:#(?:[-\w~!$+|.,*:=]  
|%[a-f\d]{2})*)?$

Here is another a bit shorter from An Improved Liberal, Accurate Regex Pattern for Matching URLs

(?i)\b((?:[a-z][\w-]+:(?:/{1,3}|[a-z0-9%])|www\d{0,3}[.]|[a-z0-9.\-]+[.]  
[a-z]{2,4}/)(?:[^\s()<>]+|\(([^\s()<>]+|(\([^\s()<>]+\)))*\))+  
(?:\(([^\s()<>]+|(\([^\s()<>]+\)))*\)|[^\s`!()\[\]{};:'".,<>?«»“”‘’]))
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up vote 0 down vote

Maybe something like this: 

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