How to extract a link from a String in Java or Groovy?

Question

Let's say you have this variable,

String message = "This is a link http://www.example.com/"

or you have this,

String message2 = "This is a link http://www.example.com/ and another link http://www.myfico.com/Images/sample_overlay.gif"

How can I extract only the link into a list?

Answer 1

Something like this will work for the two examples you give:

def links = message2.findAll(/http:\/\/\S+/)

That is, find anything that starts with http:// up until some sort of whitespace

There are more complex regular expressions over on this question , but I've not tried any of them, and they may be overkill for your situation