Find URI in text

Find URI in text is a draft programming task. It is not yet considered ready to be promoted as a complete task, for reasons that should be found in its talk page.

Write a function to search plain text for URIs.

The function should return a list of URIs found in the text.

The definition of a URI is given in RFC 3986.

For searching URIs in particular "Appendix C. Delimiting a URI in Context" is noteworthy.

Consider the following issues:

• . , ; ? ( ) are legal characters in a URI, but they are often used in plain text as a delimiter.
• a user may type an URI as seen in the browser location-bar with non-ascii characters (which are not legal).
• URIs can be something else besides http:// or https://

sample text:

this URI contains an illegal character, parentheses and a misplaced full stop:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Kästner_(camera_designer). (which is handled by http://mediawiki.org).

Regular expressions to solve the task are fine, but alternative approaches are welcome too. (otherwise, this task would degrade into 'how to apply a regular expression')