Regular Expressions Cookbook

7.4. Finding URLs with Parentheses in Full Text

Problem

You want to find URLs in a larger body of text. URLs may or may not be enclosed in punctuation that is part of the larger body of text rather than part of the URL. You want to correctly match URLs that include pairs of parentheses as part of the URL, without matching parentheses placed around the entire URL.

Solution

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

Regex options: Free-spacing, case insensitive

Regex flavors: .NET, Java, PCRE, Perl, Python, Ruby

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

Regex options: Case insensitive

Regex flavors: .NET, Java, JavaScript, PCRE, Perl, Python, Ruby

Discussion

Pretty much any character is valid in URLs, including parentheses. Parentheses are very rare in URLs, however, and that’s why we don’t include them in any of the regular expressions in the previous recipes. But certain important websites have started using them:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_Tools_(Central_Point_Software)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa752574(VS.85).aspx

One solution is to require your users to quote such URLs. The other is to enhance your regex to accept such URLs. The hard part is how to determine whether a closing parenthesis is part of the URL or is used as punctuation around ...