[java] Regular expression to match URLs in Java

The problem with all suggested approaches: all RegEx is validating

All RegEx -based code is over-engineered: it will find only valid URLs! As a sample, it will ignore anything starting with "http://" and having non-ASCII characters inside.

Even more: I have encountered 1-2-seconds processing times (single-threaded, dedicated) with Java RegEx package (filtering Email addresses from text) for very small and simple sentences, nothing specific; possibly bug in Java 6 RegEx...

Simplest/Fastest solution would be to use StringTokenizer to split text into tokens, to remove tokens starting with "http://" etc., and to concatenate tokens into text again.

If you want to filter Emails from text (because later on you will do NLP staff etc) - just remove all tokens containing "@" inside.

This is simple text where RegEx of Java 6 fails. Try it in divverent variants of Java. It takes about 1000 milliseconds per RegEx call, in a long running single threaded test application:

pattern = Pattern.compile("[A-Za-z0-9](([_\\.\\-]?[a-zA-Z0-9]+)*)@([A-Za-z0-9]+)(([\\.\\-]?[a-zA-Z0-9]+)*)\\.([A-Za-z]{2,})", Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE);

"Avalanna is such a sweet little girl! It would b heartbreaking if cancer won. She's so precious! #BeliebersPrayForAvalanna");
"@AndySamuels31 Hahahahahahahahahhaha lol, you don't look like a girl hahahahhaahaha, you are... sexy.";

Do not rely on regular expressions if you only need to filter words with "@", "http://", "ftp://", "mailto:"; it is huge engineering overhead.

If you really want to use RegEx with Java, try Automaton