Convert URL text to a link

Today seems to be the day for posting useful stuff on the blog. Actually, it’s just so I can quickly useful find bits of code I might need again.

So I’ve a got a web page that displays some text a user has entered that may contain URLs and I’d like them to be displayed as actual hyperlinks.

 

public string ConvertUrlsToLinks(string msg)
{
string regex = @"((www\.|(http|https|ftp|news|file)+\:\/\/)[_.a-z0-9-]+\.[a-z0-9\/_:@=.+?,##%&~-]*[^.|\'|\# |!|\(|?|,| |>|<|;|\)])";
Regex r = new Regex(regex, RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
return r.Replace(msg, "$1").Replace("href=\"www", "href=\"http://www");
}