Skip to content

Instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

View ashlynnwood's full-sized avatar

Ashlynn Wood ashlynnwood

View GitHub Profile

Regex: Matching a URL

Regex is a helpful tool used for text processing tasks such as searching, replacing, and extracting information from text. It consists of a sequence of characters and special characters that define a search pattern, which can match specific patterns in text. Regular expressions are widely used in programming languages and tools and can greatly simplify complex tasks that would otherwise require great manual effort. Imagine trying to extract every istance of a URL from a 100 page document, and having to "Command-F" each individual URL- sounds terrible and very time consuming, right? Well that's why regexes are here to make your life easier.

Summary

One of the common applications of regex is to match for URLs. URLs have a specific format that can be easily identified using regular expressions. A regular expression for matching URLs typically includes the protocol, domain name, and optionally a path or query parameters. By using regex to match URLs, you can easily extract informati