Change URIs in Text to HTML-Links

[strat]

One way to change URIs in Text to HTML-Links

Use the module URI::Find or URI::Find::Schemeless, e.g

<Update>
Added encode_entities in the following code because of merlyn's answer (Thank you very much!)
</Update>

#! /usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use URI::Find::Schemeless;
use HTML::Entities qw(encode_entities); # changed

my $text = q~
   hello this is no.url
   this is an url: www.fabiani.net
   ftp.anything.de/test/thisfile mailto:[e-mail] or the like
   yeah [e-mail] http://www.fabiani.net/
~;


# create a new URI::Find::Schemeless objekt and add as callback 
# the function what shell be done with each found URI
my $finder = URI::Find::Schemeless->new
  ( 
    sub {
      my ($uri, $originalUri) = @_;

# error: encode_entities is missing
#      return qq~<a href="$uri" target="_newpage">$originalUri</a>~;

      return 
        q/<a href="/ . encode_entities("$uri") . q/">/ .
        encode_entities($originalUri) . q/>/;

    }
  );

# here starts the search (and in our case the replacement):
my $howManyFound = $finder->find(\$text);

# lets have a look at the result
print "$howManyFound URIs found\n";
print "$text\n";

This will replace the following URIs:

• www.fabiani.net
• ftp.anything.de/test/thisfile
• mailto:[e-mail]
• http://www.fabiani.net/

If you just want to replace the following URIs, use URI::Find, which is more strict:

• mailto:[e-mail]
• http://www.fabiani.net/

You can do this by killing ::Schemeless:

use URI::Find; # instead of URI::Find::Schemeless
...
my $finder = URI::Find->new # instead of URI::Find::Schemeless
  ( 
    sub {
      my ($uri, $originalUri) = @_;
# error: encode_entities is missing
#      return qq~<a href="$uri" target="_newpage">$originalUri</a>~;

      return 
        q/<a href="/ . encode_entities("$uri") . q/">/ .
        encode_entities($originalUri) . q/>/;
     }
  );

...

If you dont want the Links to open a browser in a new window, just kill target="_newpage"

It is just a shame that these modules are not standard modules of perl, but I hope that they soon will become.

If your provider hasn't installed them and doesn't want to, just copy the directorries of URI to your webpath, e.g. to cgi-bin/lib and load them perhaps from your cgi-scripts which are located in cgi-bin with the modules FindBin and lib:

BEGIN {
  use FindBin qw($Bin);
  use lib "$Bin/lib";
}
use URI::Find::Schemeless;

Big thanks to mdupont for pointing me to the new interface of URI::Find (was working with find_uris for a long time, and with a piece of code much too complicated)

Best regards,

strat