I'm trying to match URLs with wildcards in them to actual URLs. For example:

http://*google/*

Needs to match

And

What would be the best way of going about this?

I've tried using a regular expression and that works fine when I manually program it but I'm not sure whether it's possible to dynamically generate regular expressions or if that would be the best practice in this situation.

/(http|https):\/\/.*\.?google\\/?.*/i

Thanks very much.

I'm trying to match URLs with wildcards in them to actual URLs. For example:

http://*google.com/*

Needs to match

http://maps.google.com

And

http://www.google.com/maps

What would be the best way of going about this?

I've tried using a regular expression and that works fine when I manually program it but I'm not sure whether it's possible to dynamically generate regular expressions or if that would be the best practice in this situation.

/(http|https):\/\/.*\.?google\.com\/?.*/i

Thanks very much.

• javascript
• regex
• url
• wildcard

• Watchout for the issue pointed out by @Sjoerd – Amarghosh Commented Jun 25, 2010 at 11:24
• 1 What was your solution to this, @sam-bowler? – yellow-saint Commented Sep 13, 2015 at 14:57

2 Answers 2

Replace all occurrences of * in the pattern with [^ ]* - it matches a sequence of zero or more non-space characters.

Thus http://*google.com/* will become http://[^ ]*google.com/[^ ]*

Here is a regular expression to do the task:

regex = urlPattern.replace(/\*/g, "[^ ]*");

If you want to see a well tested library for extracting parts of a URI, I would check out Google Closure Library's goog.uri.utils methods.

https://github.com/google/closure-library/blob/8e44fb343fff467938f9476ba7f727c6acac76d8/closure/goog/uri/utils.js#L187

Here's the regex that does the heavy lifting:

goog.uri.utils.splitRe_ = new RegExp(
    '^' +
    '(?:' +
      '([^:/?#.]+)' +                     // scheme - ignore special characters
                                          // used by other URL parts such as :,
                                          // ?, /, #, and .
    ':)?' +
    '(?://' +
      '(?:([^/?#]*)@)?' +                 // userInfo
      '([\\w\\d\\-\\u0100-\\uffff.%]*)' + // domain - restrict to letters,
                                          // digits, dashes, dots, percent
                                          // escapes, and unicode characters.
      '(?::([0-9]+))?' +                  // port
    ')?' +
    '([^?#]+)?' +                         // path
    '(?:\\?([^#]*))?' +                   // query
    '(?:#(.*))?' +                        // fragment
    '$');