Autolink hyperlinks links that are already hyperlinked

Did some experimenting:

include ActionView::Helpers::TextHelper
include ERB::Util
include ActionView::Helpers::TagHelper
url = 'foo'
=> "
=> "
=> "
=> "

My thoughts on the subject, the way to fix auto_link to handle this case would be to change it to be able to parse the HTML spec. It seems like a significant amount of work to enable this behavior

And the formatted version...

require 'action_view'
include ActionView::Helpers::TextHelper
include ERB::Util
include ActionView::Helpers::TagHelper
url = '<a href="http://www.yahoo.com" >foo</a>'
 => "<a href=\"http://www.yahoo.com\" >foo</a>"
auto_link(url)
 => "<a href=\"http://www.yahoo.com\" >foo</a>" 
url = '<a href="http://www.yahoo.com" >http://www.google.com</a>'
 => "<a href=\"http://www.yahoo.com\" >http://www.google.com</a>" 
auto_link(url)
 => "<a href=\"http://www.yahoo.com\" ><a href=\"http://www.google.com\">http://www.google.com</a></a>"

This is also how RDiscount(markdown parser) behaves. Not saying it's the perfect argument to say this is not a bug but if it requires a lot of work, maybe it's best not to pass html'ized links to auto_link.

RDiscount behaviour:

ruby-1.9.2-head > puts RDiscount.new('<a href="http://google.com">http://google.com</a>', :autolink).to_html
<p><a href="http://google.com"><a href="http://google.com">http://google.com</a></a></p>
 => nil