Regex to flexibly match anything that looks url like

url_regex.py

import re

url_regex = re.compile(r"""[^\s]             # not whitespace
               [a-zA-Z0-9:/\-]+  # the protocol and domain name
               \.(?!\.)          # A literal '.' not followed by another
               [\w\-\./\?=&%~#]+ # country and path components
               [^\s]             # not whitespace""", re.VERBOSE)

test_corpus = """
    http://www.example.com and some text. www.example.com/?q=4897&7845%20 example.co.nz example.com/#my-tab
""" 

print url_regex.findall(test_corpus)