Linkify is a Rust library to find links such as URLs and email addresses in plain text. It's smart about where a link ends, such as with trailing punctuation.
Your reaction might be: "Do I need a library for this? Why not a regex?". Let's look at a few cases:
- In
http://example.com/.the link should not include the trailing dot http://example.com/,should not include the trailing comma(http://example.com/)should not include the parens
Seems simple enough. But then we also have these cases:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_(The_Legend_of_Zelda)should include the trailing parenhttp://üñîçøðé.com/äshould also work for Unicode (including Emoji and Punycode)<http://example.com/>should not include angle brackets
This library behaves as you'd expect in the above cases and many more. It uses a simple scan with linear runtime.
In addition to URLs, it can also find email addresses.
Try it out on the demo playground (Rust compiled to WebAssembly): https://robinst.github.io/linkify/
Basic usage:
extern crate linkify;
use linkify::{LinkFinder, LinkKind};
let input = "Have you seen http://example.com?";
let finder = LinkFinder::new();
let links: Vec<_> = finder.links(input).collect();
assert_eq!(1, links.len());
let link = &links[0];
assert_eq!("http://example.com", link.as_str());
assert_eq!(14, link.start());
assert_eq!(32, link.end());
assert_eq!(&LinkKind::Url, link.kind());Restrict the kinds of links:
use linkify::{LinkFinder, LinkKind};
let input = "http://example.com and foo@example.com";
let mut finder = LinkFinder::new();
finder.kinds(&[LinkKind::Email]);
let links: Vec<_> = finder.links(input).collect();
assert_eq!(1, links.len());
let link = &links[0];
assert_eq!("foo@example.com", link.as_str());
assert_eq!(&LinkKind::Email, link.kind());See full documentation on docs.rs.
This crates makes an effort to respect the various standards, namely:
- RFC 3986 and RFC 3987 for URLs
- RFC 5321 and RFC 6531 for email addresses (except IP addresses and quoting)
At the same time, it does not guarantee that the returned links are valid. If in doubt, it rather returns a link than skipping it.
If you need to validate URLs, e.g. for checking TLDs, use another library on the returned links.
Pull requests, issues and comments welcome! Make sure to add tests for new features and bug fixes.
Linkify is distributed under the terms of both the MIT license and the Apache License (Version 2.0). See LICENSE-APACHE and LICENSE-MIT for details. Opening a pull requests is assumed to signal agreement with these licensing terms.