Thread: Regular Expressions with URL's

Does anyone have an example of a regular expression that takes all hyperlinks and email addresses and converts them into links? The text displayed would be the same text as the hyperlink or email address, but it would be a link, either an <a href> or <a mailto> link, depending on which it is. The other thing I would want is for the link text displayed be limited in length. For instance, if the string was 200 characters long, I could tell the regular expression function to limit the length to 50 characters, and add a "..." to the end of the link, hiding 150 characters and showing the first 50. Any ideas? Here is what I have now but cannot seem to figure out how to implement the character length bit:

Code:

Function LinkURLs(tempTxt)
  	Dim regEx
  	Set regEx = New RegExp
  	regEx.Global = True
  	regEx.IgnoreCase = True


  	'Hyperlink Email Addresses
  	regEx.Pattern = "([_.a-z0-9-]+@[_.a-z0-9-]+\.[a-z]{2,3})"
  	tempTxt = regEx.Replace(tempTxt, "<a href=""mailto:$1"" class=""blackBold"">$1</a>")


  	'Hyperlink URL's
  	regEx.Pattern = "((www\.|(http|https|ftp|news|file)+\:\/\/)[_.a-z0-9-]+\.[a-z0-9\/_:@=.+?,##%&~-]*[^.|\'|\# |!|\(|?|,| |>|<|;|\)])"
 	tempTxt = regEx.Replace(tempTxt, "<a href=""$1"" class=""blackBold"" target=""_blank"">$1</a>")                 


  	'Make <a href="www = <a href="http://www
  	tempTxt = Replace(tempTxt, "href=""www", "href=""http://www")


  	LinkURLs = tempTxt & vbCrLf
End Function

Well, seeing as you have the hard part figured out...why not just use the Left and Len functions to "trim" the text portion of the hyperlink tag and then append the three periods?

Because this line is giving me an issue:

Code:

tempTxt = regEx.Replace(tempTxt, "<a href=""$1"" class=""blackBold"" target=""_blank"">$1</a>")

When I tried to add different functions, it gives me an error. I wouldn't be asking if I could easily solve it.

What have you tried? Where are you adding it??

Well, I have a function that takes a text string, and trims it down to the number of characters you specify:

Code:

tempTxt = regEx.Replace(tempTxt, "<a href=""$1"" class=""blackBold"" target=""_blank"">" & TrimString($1, 50) & "</a>")

It gives me an 'Invalid Character' error where the opening bracket in the TrimString function starts.