How to highlight URLs in text?

[K1200]

Can anyone offer a suggestion for a good approach to highlight URLs within text fields? FMP has provided the right-click "Open: http: //........" for years. However, it's often hard to spot a short URL (like http:// www .m-w.com) in a large text block. I'd like to have any URL highlighted in a different text color or maybe underlined like a link.

I've considered occasionally running a script to parse all text fields in my application and insert color settings. Or (in FMP 10) have a script that executes upon exiting each field, to modify them one at a time. Hopefully, someone has considered this before and can offer some insight.

Thanks for any help.

[Lee Smith]

Is the text field a concatenation of several fields? i.e. Name, address, web site, notes, etc., or is this a large text field where the information is already part of the text in the field?

Lee

[Ocean West]

an option would also be to use a web viewer to display the text block then the url's would appear as links making them clickable...

http://www.filemakermagazine.com/videos/zero-to-awesome-using-data-objects.html

http://sixfriedrice.com/wp/filemaker-9-tip9-web-viewers-without-the-web/

[K1200]

Lee --

It's a large text field. And I forgot to mention that it might contain more than one URL.

Ocean --

An interesting idea. Unfortunately, the layouts involved are somewhat set in stone so web viewer can't be used in my specific instance.

[comment]

It should be quite easy to "highlight" the http:/ prefix, by substituting it with a styled version of the same. To do this for the entire URL would require a custom recursive function (or a script) - which could get rather complex, esp. since a URL can be followed by a variety of punctuation characters.

[K1200]

Thanks for the suggestion.

I'll probably just go for the highlight of the prefix. Oddly, though, FileMaker has an internal calculation that can exactly isolate a URL within text. It never seems to miss displaying the "Open://www......." upon a right click within the field. Too bad it can't be accessed.

[comment]

I suspect this is a service provided by the OS and not something that Filemaker does on its own. At least on a Mac, you get the same option in just about any application that allows you to edit text. In any case, Filemaker programmers have access to regular expressions - unlike Filemaker developers.