Url Replace With Anchor, Not Replacing Existing Anchors

I'm building code matching and replacing several types of patterns (bbCode). One of the matches I'm trying to make, is [url=http:example.com] replacing all with anchor links. I'm a

Solution 1:

Maybe something like this?

/(?:(?:ht|f)tps?:\/\/|www)[^<>\]]+?(?![^<>\]]*([>]|<\/))(?=[\s!,?\]]|$)/gm

And then trim the dots at the end if any.

regex101 demo

Though if the link contains more punctuations, it might cause some issues... I would then suggest capturing the link first, then remove the trailing punctuations with a second replace.

[^<>\]]+ will match every character except <, > and ]

(?![^<>\]]*([>]|<\/)) prevents the matching of a link between html tags.

(?=[\s!,?\]]|$) is for the punctuations and whitespace.

Solution 2:

Following regex should work. It's giving desired result on your sample inputs.

/((?:(?:ht|f)tps?:\/\/|www)[^\s,?!]+(?!.*<\/a>))/gm

See it in action here

(?!.*<\/a>) - Negative lookahead for anchor

Matching content will be stored in $1 and can be used in replace string.

EDIT

To not match content with <img src .. following can be used

(^(?!.*<img\s+src)(?:(?:ht|f)tps?:\/\/|www)[^\s,?!]+(?!.*<\/a>))

Solution 3:

can p.replace be a function? if so:

var text = 'http://www.example.com \n' +
           'http://www.example.com/test \n' +
           'http://example.com/test \n' +
           'www.example.com/test \n' +
           '<a href="http://www.example.com">http://www.example.com </a>\n' +
           '<a href="http://www.example.com/test">http://www.example.com/test </a>\n' +
           '<a href="http://example.com/test">http://example.com/test </a>\n' +
           '<a href="www.example.com/test">www.example.com/test </a>';
var p = {
    flag: true,
    pattern: /(<a[^<]*<\/a>)|((ht|f)tps?:\/\/|www\.).*?(?=\s|$)/ig,
    replace: function ($0, $1) {
                 if ($1) {
                     return$0;
                 } else {
                     p.flag =true;
                     return"construct replacement string here";
                 }
    }
};
while(p.flag){
    p.flag =false;
    text = text.replace(p.pattern, p.replace);
}

The part of the regex I added is (<a[^<]*<\/a>)| to check if the url is anywhere inside an anchor, if so then the replacement function ignores it.

If you want to avoid the url inside <a href="..."> but other urls inside the anchor are to be replaced, then change (<a[^<]*<\/a>)| to (<a[^>]*>)|