Groovy- how to recognize a url in the text and display it as hyperlink

Question

I tried encodeAsHTML() as the following:

<p class="common-textmb-30">${direction?.description?.encodeAsHTML()}</p>

where "direction?.description" is a text which the user enterd in some input.

It didn't detect the url.

Answer 1

encodeAsHTML just escapes reserved HTML symbols (such as <) to an entity reference (< for the previous example), so that the text is not interpreted by the browser, but presented as it originally was.

You can detect if an String is a valid using the java class java.net.URL:

boolean isURL(String someString) {
   try { 
      new URL(someString)
   } catch (MalformedURLException e) {
      false
   }
}

but is not something you would put in the view. You can therefore use a taglib:

class ViewFormatterTagLib {

   static namespace = 'viewFormatter'
   def renderAsLinkIfPossible = { attrs ->
      String text = attrs.text
      out << (
         isURL(text) ? "<a href='${text}'>${text}</a>" : text
      )
   }

   private boolean isURL(String someString) {
       try { 
          new URL(someString)
       } catch (MalformedURLException e) {
          false
       }
    }
}

and in the view just do:

<p class="common-textmb-30">
   <viewFormatter:renderAsLinkIfPossible text="${direction?.description"/>
</p>