Due to the absence of external maintenance, this is now a fully Zendesk owned/maintained gem.

Rinku is a Ruby library that does autolinking. It parses text and turns anything that remotely resembles a link into an HTML link, just like the Ruby on Rails auto_link method -- but it's about 20 times faster, because it's written in C, and it's about 20 times smarter when linking, because it does actual parsing instead of RegEx replacements.

Rinku is available as a Ruby gem:

$ [sudo] gem install rinku

The Rinku source is available at GitHub:

$ git clone git://github.com/zendesk/rinku.git

It exports a single method called Rinku.auto_link.

require 'rinku'

Rinku.auto_link(text, mode=:all, link_attr=nil, skip_tags=nil)
Rinku.auto_link(text, mode=:all, link_attr=nil, skip_tags=nil) { |link_text| ... }

Parses a block of text looking for "safe" urls or email addresses, and turns them into HTML links with the given attributes.

NOTE: The block of text may or may not be HTML; if the text is HTML, Rinku will skip the relevant tags to prevent double-linking and linking inside pre blocks by default.

NOTE: If the input text is HTML, it's expected to be already escaped. Rinku will perform no escaping.

NOTE: Currently the follow protocols are considered safe and are the only ones that will be autolinked.

http:// https:// ftp:// mailto://

Email addresses are also autolinked by default. URLs without a protocol specifier but starting with 'www.' will also be autolinked, defaulting to the 'http://' protocol.

• text is a string in plain text or HTML markup. If the string is formatted in HTML, Rinku is smart enough to skip the links that are already enclosed in <a> tags.`

• mode is a symbol, either :all, :urls or :email_addresses, which specifies which kind of links will be auto-linked.

• link_attr is a string containing the link attributes for each link that will be generated. These attributes are not sanitized and will be include as-is in each generated link, e.g.

  auto_link('http://www.pokemon.com', :all, 'target="_blank"')
  # => '<a href="http://www.pokemon.com" target="_blank">http://www.pokemon.com</a>'

  This string can be autogenerated from a hash using the Rails tag_options helper.

• skip_tags is a list of strings with the names of HTML tags that will be skipped when autolinking. If nil, this defaults to the value of the global Rinku.skip_tags, which is initially ["a", "pre", "code", "kbd", "script"].

• &block is an optional block argument. If a block is passed, it will be yielded for each found link in the text, and its return value will be used instead of the name of the link. E.g.

  auto_link('Check it out at http://www.pokemon.com') do |url|
    "THE POKEMAN WEBSITEZ"
  end
  # => 'Check it out at <a href="http://www.pokemon.com">THE POKEMAN WEBSITEZ</a>'

Auto-linking functionality has been removed from Rails 3.1, and is instead offered as a standalone gem, rails_autolink. You can choose to use Rinku instead.

require 'rails_rinku'

The rails_rinku package monkeypatches Rails with an auto_link method that mimics 100% the original one, parameter per parameter. It's just faster.

Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND THE AUTHOR DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES WITH REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR ANY SPECIAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE.