update but of course be sure to read tye's crit of halley's got-there-first version of this, benn's late entry...:)

As artist implies, there are more well-thought-out solutions to this particular problem than you can shake a stick at.

*If*, however, you're doing this purely as an learning exercise {g}, then you're correct - "\w" matches *only* alphanumerics and '_' - "http://" will throw it for instance. "." matches anything...you could use that, or a character class ('[\w:\/-]*' or something) to match only the characters that you want.

If you use "." though, be warned that "*" is 'greedy' - if your page contains more than one '" TITLE=""><b>Click Here' , then ".*" will grab a whole lot more than you bargained for...you'll probably want to make it ".*?" - the "?" makes it 'minimal'.

Hope this clarifies things,
Cheers, Ben.

In reply to Re: Parsing out URLs with regex by benn
in thread Parsing out URLs with regex by xtomservox

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.