40995 - [RFE]Detect and link plain-text URLs

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 39042

(SeaMonkey :: General, enhancement, P3)

Description

[mozilla]

If a text stream includes http://blahblahblah, it would be nice if mozilla would 
turn that into an active link.  It might be a challenge to come up with 
universal rules for determining the end of the link (if it's in a sentence, it 
may be followed by punctuation, that sort of thing.)

Comment 1

[WD]

I'm not sure if we want to go here.    Maybe as a feature that can be turned
on/off perhaps?
Anybody else?

Comment 2

[mozilla]

(Note that bugzilla does this exact request...)  An alternative possibility (or 
a completely separate, but compatible feature) would be to allow the user to 
mark a line of text and then "treat as link" or perhaps "Go to location" would 
be an option in the context menu for that selection.  Note that this wouldn't be 
confined to recognizeable URLs, it could treat the text just as it does in the  
Location: text entry box -- so selecting "mozilla" would take you to 
http://www.mozilla.org.

Comment 3

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-4, no longer working on Mozilla)]

One could support the <URL: url-here > syntax defined in RFC 1738, along with
other heuristics (i.e., recognize common scheme starts (http:, ftp:, news:,
etc.) and then include all characters valid in a URL.

Marking confirmed, since this is a valid RFE, although I'm not sure what to do
with it.  (But it might be a dup...)

Comment 4

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-4, no longer working on Mozilla)]

cc:ing Ben Bucksch, who might have some ideas about how to implement this for
normal text files (since he wrote the text to html converter).

Comment 5

[Blake Ross]

I'm not sure about auto-detecting and transforming plaintext into URLs, but I 
know the "treat as link" or "go to selection" context menu suggestions are a 
dup of something I saw awhile ago

Comment 6

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

The code is all there, see <http://www.bucksch.org/1/projects/mozilla/16507>. It
only has to be used by the browser. DUP of 39042.

The selection recognition is bug 10080.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 39042 ***

Comment 7

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

Verified dup.