Need a good regex to convert URLs to links but leave existing links alone

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Jan Goyvaerts, creator of RegexBuddy, has written a response to Jeff Atwood’s blog that addresses the issues Jeff had and provides a nice solution. 

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

In order to ignore matches that occur right next to a ” or >, you could add (?<![">]) to the start of the regex, so you get

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

This will match full addresses (http://...) and addresses that start with www. or ftp. – you’re out of luck with addresses like ars.userfriendly.org…

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