I current have str.match(/(http[^\s]+)/i) which not only captures link in the content, but also in img tag(src="http...") and anchor tag(href="http...")
How do I modify my regex so that it matches only "http/s" that has no "src=" or "href=" before it?
You can use an additional \s. href or src will not have a whitespace character before the URL. In normal text, there is a whitespace.
str.match(/\s(http[^\s]+)/i)
Also see DEMO
You can catch links that don't start with an = nor a quote before the http/s:
str.match(/[^=\"](http[^\s]+)/i)
You can overmatch using simple http[^\s]+ (=http\S+).
I'd suggest to use a regex to match text outside of tags, and whitelist those tags where you allow the text to appear. Here is the regex:
/(?![^<]*>|[^<>]*<\/(?!p\b|td|pre))https?:\/\/[a-z0-9&#=.\/\-?_]+/gi
(?!p\b|td|pre) part is where we add whitelisted tags. The regex won't capture http://example.com,.
See demo
