how to wrap urls with anchor tag and ignore urls that already have anchor tags in jquery

Question

i have a simple replace function that replaces urls like

http://www.example.com to  <a href="www.example.com">http://www.example.com</a>

given below

text = text.replace(/(\s|>|^)(https?:[^\s<]*)/igm,'$1<a href="$2" class="oembed" >$2</a>');
text = text.replace(/(\s|>|^)(mailto:[^\s<]*)/igm,'$1<a href="$2" class="oembed" target="_blank">$2</a>');

The problem is that it wraps urls inside anchor tags as well and i have to give html as input so help me out with the regexp to ignore wraping anchor tag for urls already having an anchor tag

Answer 1

Well if you are creating urls one by one and appending to dom right after you create them then you can try something like

var url = $('a[href="url you are about to create"]');
if(url== undefined)
// url does not exist, create.
else
//already added, ignore

Answer 2

If you are using jQuery you can try the following method which ignores all the elements( including a elements ) and wraps the textNodes that match the regex.

var url = /(http|https):\/\/[\w-]+(\.[\w-]+)+([\w.,@?^=%&:\/~+#-]*[\w@?^=%&\/~+#-])?/gi;
var mailto = /(mailto:[a-z0-9_\.-]+)@([\da-z\.-]+)\.([a-z\.]{2,6})$/gi;

str = $('<div>').html(str).contents().each(function () {
    if (this.nodeType === 3) { // if node is a textNode
        $(this).replaceWith(function () {
            return this.nodeValue.replace(url, function (m) {
                return '<a href="' + m + '" class="oembed">' + m + '</a>';
            }).replace(mailto, function(m) {
                return '<a href="' + m + '" class="oembed" target="_blank">' + m + '</a>';
            });
        })
    }
}).end().html();

http://jsfiddle.net/E8V5y/