[regexfree]

Write a free-space regular expression in Regex101, paste it in the top box, and the bottom box will compile it. Put the compiled regex in your code, and the free-space source in your comments.

⬇️	Convert ( to (?: /regex/ "regex"

What's this?

This tool lets you write regexes that look like this:

(
  # When using http://, allow any domain
  https?:\/\/ [a-z0-9-]+ ( \. [a-z0-9-]+ )*
|
  # When using www., expect at least one more dot
  www \. [a-z0-9-]+ ( \. [a-z0-9-]+ )+
|
  # Otherwise, allow any domain, but only if
  [a-z0-9-]+ ( \. [a-z0-9-]+ )* \.
  (
    # followed either a common TLD...
    com? | org | net | edu | info | us | jp
  |
    # or any 2-3 letter TLD followed by : or /
    [a-z]{2,3} (?=[:\/])
  )
)


Instead of this:

/(?:https?:\/\/[a-z0-9-]+(?:\.[a-z0-9-]+)*|www\.[a-z0-9-]+(?:\.[a-z0-9-]+)+|[a-z0-9-]+(?:\.[a-z0-9-]+)*\.(?:com?|org|net|edu|info|us|jp|[a-z]{2,3}(?=[:\/])))/

It's called a free-space regular expression: it ignores whitespace, so you can line-break and indent it however you want. To actually search for a space, use \ . You can also add comments starting with #.

This lets you use XRegExp without the performance impact.

(GitHub)