Linkifying text fragments

bleach.linkify() searches text for links, URLs, and email addresses and lets you control how and when those links are rendered.

It works by building a document tree, so it’s guaranteed never to do weird things to URLs in attribute values, can modify the value of attributes on <a> tags and can even do things like skip <pre> sections.

Note

You may pass a string or unicode object, but Bleach will always return unicode.

bleach.linkify(text, callbacks=[<function nofollow>], skip_tags=None, parse_email=False)

Convert URL-like strings in an HTML fragment to links

This function converts strings that look like URLs, domain names and email addresses in text that may be an HTML fragment to links, while preserving:

1. links already in the string
2. urls found in attributes
3. email addresses

linkify does a best-effort approach and tries to recover from bad situations due to crazy text.

Note

If you’re linking a lot of text and passing the same argument values or you want more configurability, consider using a bleach.linkifier.Linker instance.

Note

If you have text that you want to clean and then linkify, consider using the bleach.linkifier.LinkifyFilter as a filter in the clean pass. That way you’re not parsing the HTML twice.

Parameters:

• text (str) – the text to linkify
• callbacks (list) – list of callbacks to run when adjusting tag attributes; defaults to bleach.linkifier.DEFAULT_CALLBACKS
• skip_tags (list) – list of tags that you don’t want to linkify the contents of; for example, you could set this to ['pre'] to skip linkifying contents of pre tags
• parse_email (bool) – whether or not to linkify email addresses

Returns:

linkified text as unicode

Callbacks for adjusting attributes (callbacks)

The second argument to linkify() is a list or other iterable of callback functions. These callbacks can modify links that exist and links that are being created, or remove them completely.

Each callback will get the following arguments:

def my_callback(attrs, new=False):

The attrs argument is a dict of attributes of the <a> tag. Keys of the attrs dict are namespaced attr names. For example (None, 'href'). The attrs dict also contains a _text key, which is the innerText of the <a> tag.

The new argument is a boolean indicating if the link is new (e.g. an email address or URL found in the text) or already existed (e.g. an <a> tag found in the text).

The callback must return a dict of attributes (including _text) or None. The new dict of attributes will be passed to the next callback in the list.

If any callback returns None, new links will not be created and existing links will be removed leaving the innerText left in its place.

The default callback adds rel="nofollow". See bleach.callbacks for some included callback functions.

This defaults to bleach.linkify.DEFAULT_CALLBACKS.

bleach.linkifier.DEFAULT_CALLBACKS = [<function nofollow>]

List of default callbacks

Changed in version 2.0: In previous versions of Bleach, the attribute names were not namespaced.

Setting Attributes

For example, you could add a title attribute to all links:

>>> from bleach.linkifier import Linker

>>> def set_title(attrs, new=False):
...     attrs[(None, u'title')] = u'link in user text'
...     return attrs
...
>>> linker = Linker(callbacks=[set_title])
>>> linker.linkify('abc http://example.com def')
u'abc <a href="http://example.com" title="link in user text">http://example.com</a> def'

This would set the value of the rel attribute, stomping on a previous value if there was one.

Here’s another example that makes external links open in a new tab and look like an external link:

>>> from urlparse import urlparse
>>> from bleach.linkifier import Linker

>>> def set_target(attrs, new=False):
...     p = urlparse(attrs[(None, u'href')])
...     if p.netloc not in ['my-domain.com', 'other-domain.com']:
...         attrs[(None, u'target')] = u'_blank'
...         attrs[(None, u'class')] = u'external'
...     else:
...         attrs.pop((None, u'target'), None)
...     return attrs
...
>>> linker = Linker(callbacks=[set_target])
>>> linker.linkify('abc http://example.com def')
u'abc <a class="external" href="http://example.com" target="_blank">http://example.com</a> def'

Removing Attributes

You can easily remove attributes you don’t want to allow, even on existing links (<a> tags) in the text. (See also clean() for sanitizing attributes.)

>>> from bleach.linkifier import Linker

>>> def allowed_attrs(attrs, new=False):
...     """Only allow href, target, rel and title."""
...     allowed = [
...         (None, u'href'),
...         (None, u'target'),
...         (None, u'rel'),
...         (None, u'title'),
...         u'_text',
...     ]
...     return dict((k, v) for k, v in attrs.items() if k in allowed)
...
>>> linker = Linker(callbacks=[allowed_attrs])
>>> linker.linkify('<a style="font-weight: super bold;" href="http://example.com">link</a>')
u'<a href="http://example.com">link</a>'

Or you could remove a specific attribute, if it exists:

>>> from bleach.linkifier import Linker

>>> def remove_title(attrs, new=False):
...     attrs.pop((None, u'title'), None)
...     return attrs
...
>>> linker = Linker(callbacks=[remove_title])
>>> linker.linkify('<a href="http://example.com">link</a>')
u'<a href="http://example.com">link</a>'

>>> linker.linkify('<a title="bad title" href="http://example.com">link</a>')
u'<a href="http://example.com">link</a>'

Altering Attributes

You can alter and overwrite attributes, including the link text, via the _text key, to, for example, pass outgoing links through a warning page, or limit the length of text inside an <a> tag.

Example of shortening link text:

>>> from bleach.linkifier import Linker

>>> def shorten_url(attrs, new=False):
...     """Shorten overly-long URLs in the text."""
...     # Only adjust newly-created links
...     if not new:
...         return attrs
...     # _text will be the same as the URL for new links
...     text = attrs[u'_text']
...     if len(text) > 25:
...         attrs[u'_text'] = text[0:22] + u'...'
...     return attrs
...
>>> linker = Linker(callbacks=[shorten_url])
>>> linker.linkify('http://example.com/longlonglonglonglongurl')
u'<a href="http://example.com/longlonglonglonglongurl">http://example.com/lon...</a>'

Example of switching all links to go through a bouncer first:

>>> from six.moves.urllib.parse import quote, urlparse
>>> from bleach.linkifier import Linker

>>> def outgoing_bouncer(attrs, new=False):
...     """Send outgoing links through a bouncer."""
...     href_key = (None, u'href')
...     p = urlparse(attrs.get(href_key, None))
...     if p.netloc not in ['example.com', 'www.example.com', '']:
...         bouncer = 'http://bn.ce/?destination=%s'
...         attrs[href_key] = bouncer % quote(attrs[href_key])
...     return attrs
...
>>> linker = Linker(callbacks=[outgoing_bouncer])
>>> linker.linkify('http://example.com')
u'<a href="http://example.com">http://example.com</a>'

>>> linker.linkify('http://foo.com')
u'<a href="http://bn.ce/?destination=http%3A//foo.com">http://foo.com</a>'

Preventing Links

A slightly more complex example is inspired by Crate, where strings like models.py are often found, and linkified. .py is the ccTLD for Paraguay, so example.py may be a legitimate URL, but in the case of a site dedicated to Python packages, odds are it is not. In this case, Crate could write the following callback:

>>> from bleach.linkifier import Linker

>>> def dont_linkify_python(attrs, new=False):
...     # This is an existing link, so leave it be
...     if not new:
...         return attrs
...     # If the TLD is '.py', make sure it starts with http: or https:.
...     # Use _text because that's the original text
...     link_text = attrs[u'_text']
...     if link_text.endswith('.py') and not link_text.startswith(('http:', 'https:')):
...         # This looks like a Python file, not a URL. Don't make a link.
...         return None
...     # Everything checks out, keep going to the next callback.
...     return attrs
...
>>> linker = Linker(callbacks=[dont_linkify_python])
>>> linker.linkify('abc http://example.com def')
u'abc <a href="http://example.com">http://example.com</a> def'

>>> linker.linkify('abc models.py def')
u'abc models.py def'

Removing Links

If you want to remove certain links, even if they are written in the text with <a> tags, have the callback return None.

For example, this removes any mailto: links:

>>> from bleach.linkifier import Linker

>>> def remove_mailto(attrs, new=False):
...     if attrs[(None, u'href')].startswith(u'mailto:'):
...         return None
...     return attrs
...
>>> linker = Linker(callbacks=[remove_mailto])
>>> linker.linkify('<a href="mailto:janet@example.com">mail janet!</a>')
u'mail janet!'

Skipping links in specified tag blocks (skip_tags)

<pre> tags are often special, literal sections. If you don’t want to create any new links within a <pre> section, pass skip_tags=['pre'].

This works for code, div and any other blocks you want to skip over.

Changed in version 2.0: This used to be skip_pre, but this makes it more general.

Linkifying email addresses (parse_email)

By default, bleach.linkify() does not create mailto: links for email addresses, but if you pass parse_email=True, it will. mailto: links will go through exactly the same set of callbacks as all other links, whether they are newly created or already in the text, so be careful when writing callbacks that may need to behave differently if the protocol is mailto:.

Using bleach.linkifier.Linker

If you’re linking a lot of text and passing the same argument values or you want more configurability, consider using a bleach.linkifier.Linker instance.

>>> from bleach.linkifier import Linker

>>> linker = Linker(skip_tags=['pre'])
>>> linker.linkify('a b c http://example.com d e f')
u'a b c <a href="http://example.com" rel="nofollow">http://example.com</a> d e f'

class bleach.linkifier.Linker(callbacks=[<function nofollow>], skip_tags=None, parse_email=False, url_re=<_sre.SRE_Pattern object at 0x2ce77c0>, email_re=<_sre.SRE_Pattern object at 0x2cd4930>)

Convert URL-like strings in an HTML fragment to links

This function converts strings that look like URLs, domain names and email addresses in text that may be an HTML fragment to links, while preserving:

1. links already in the string
2. urls found in attributes
3. email addresses

linkify does a best-effort approach and tries to recover from bad situations due to crazy text.

Creates a Linker instance

Parameters:

• callbacks (list) – list of callbacks to run when adjusting tag attributes; defaults to bleach.linkifier.DEFAULT_CALLBACKS
• skip_tags (list) – list of tags that you don’t want to linkify the contents of; for example, you could set this to ['pre'] to skip linkifying contents of pre tags
• parse_email (bool) – whether or not to linkify email addresses
• url_re (re) – url matching regex
• email_re (re) – email matching regex

Returns:

linkified text as unicode

linkify(text)

Linkify specified text

Parameters:text (str) – the text to add links to Returns:linkified text as unicode

New in version 2.0.

Using bleach.linkifier.LinkifyFilter

bleach.linkify works by paring an HTML fragment and then running it through the bleach.linkifier.LinkifyFilter when walking the tree and serializing it back into text.

You can use this filter wherever you can use an html5lib Filter. For example, you could use it with bleach.Cleaner to clean and linkify in one step.

For example, using all the defaults:

>>> from functools import partial

>>> from bleach import Cleaner
>>> from bleach.linkifier import LinkifyFilter

>>> cleaner = Cleaner(tags=['pre'])
>>> cleaner.clean('<pre>http://example.com</pre>')
u'<pre>http://example.com</pre>'

>>> cleaner = Cleaner(tags=['pre'], filters=[LinkifyFilter])
>>> cleaner.clean('<pre>http://example.com</pre>')
u'<pre><a href="http://example.com">http://example.com</a></pre>'

And passing parameters to LinkifyFilter:

>>> from functools import partial

>>> from bleach.sanitizer import Cleaner
>>> from bleach.linkifier import LinkifyFilter

>>> cleaner = Cleaner(
...     tags=['pre'],
...     filters=[partial(LinkifyFilter, skip_tags=['pre'])]
... )
...
>>> cleaner.clean('<pre>http://example.com</pre>')
u'<pre>http://example.com</pre>'

class bleach.linkifier.LinkifyFilter(source, callbacks=None, skip_tags=None, parse_email=False, url_re=<_sre.SRE_Pattern object at 0x2ce77c0>, email_re=<_sre.SRE_Pattern object at 0x2cd4930>)

html5lib filter that linkifies text

This will do the following:

• convert email addresses into links
• convert urls into links
• edit existing links by running them through callbacks–the default is to add a rel="nofollow"

This filter can be used anywhere html5lib filters can be used.

Creates a LinkifyFilter instance

Parameters:

• source (TreeWalker) – stream
• callbacks (list) – list of callbacks to run when adjusting tag attributes; defaults to bleach.linkifier.DEFAULT_CALLBACKS
• skip_tags (list) – list of tags that you don’t want to linkify the contents of; for example, you could set this to ['pre'] to skip linkifying contents of pre tags
• parse_email (bool) – whether or not to linkify email addresses
• url_re (re) – url matching regex
• email_re (re) – email matching regex

New in version 2.0.