I've been removing tracking IDs from website addresses that users post to my message boards and classifieds, which has admittedly gotten WAY more complicated than I intended. But I've recently run across a new one, so I'm curious how you guys and gals would suggest dealing with it.

In this example, the link looked like:

https://example.com/foo/bar|pcrid|391022977133|pkw||pmt||pdv|m|slid||product||pgrid|78378217177|ptaid||&pgrid=78378217177&ptaid=&source=WFP2019-DD-NATL-GD-US-BCON&subsource=78378217177---391022977133&refcode=WFP2019-DD-NATL-GD-US-BCON&refcode2=78378217177---391022977133&utm_source=Google&utm_campaign=WFP2019-DD-NATL-GD-US-BCON&utm_term=-391022977133&utm_medium=Display&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIpMLsjry95QIVQqFRCh3slA_eEAEYASAAEgLLc_D_BwE

I use Perl's URI::Find to find links in the text and convert it to a <a href=...>...</a> tag, but it doesn't recognize the | delimiter so I end up with:

<a href="https://example.com/foo/bar">https://example.com/foo/bar</a>|pcrid|391022977133|pkw||pmt||pdv|m|slid||product||pgrid|78378217177|ptaid||&pgrid=78378217177&ptaid=&source=WFP2019-DD-NATL-GD-US-BCON&subsource=78378217177---391022977133&refcode=WFP2019-DD-NATL-GD-US-BCON&refcode2=78378217177---391022977133&utm_source=Google&utm_campaign=WFP2019-DD-NATL-GD-US-BCON&utm_term=-391022977133&utm_medium=Display&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIpMLsjry95QIVQqFRCh3slA_eEAEYASAAEgLLc_D_BwE

And since the rest of that isn't recognized as part of the link, my system doesn't remove any of those parameters, including the parts that are actually delimited by & (and it would usually remove all of them).

I'm kind of at a loss on how to handle this one. I could use a regex to find http, followed by anything that's not a space, until it gets to a |, and then remove everything after and including that |. That's a bit dangerous since someone could realistically use a | in the parameter value that I wouldn't want to remove, though.

I guess that the regex would look something like:

$text =~ s#\b(https?://[^\s])\|[^\s]*\b#$1#i;

What do you all think?