PHP - Prepend a url to all links with no http or https

Question

Relatively new to php and looking for some help in updating links on a specific page. The page has numerous links eg. href=/link/ and I would like to code the page to identify these links (links that do not already have http or https) and prepend with a url eg. www.domain.com to each. Basically ending up with href=www.domain.com/link/. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Huh?! There needs to be a badge for "worst worded question of the day!" You use the words "prepend" (what?!) and "append" in your answer. Does that mean if you give me "example.com" you want "example.comwww.somelink.com"? b/c that's what you're asking... — Theodore R. Smith, Sep 09 '10 at 22:51
Sorry about the the wording. The Link Name was supposed to read href=/link-name/. I need code that will update find all of these type links to have http:/domain.com placed at the beginning. So after the code runs href='/link-name/ would read href=http://domain.com/link-name/ — user443873, Sep 10 '10 at 01:13
Yes.....I know hopeseekr. Thanks for your patience in letting me update and get it going in the right direction. Your example looks good. Plan on implementing this weekend and will post back the results. — user443873, Sep 11 '10 at 13:06

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 09 '10 at 22:59

I think you want to parse a list of URLs and prepend "http://" to the ones that don't have it.

<?php
$links = array('http://www.redditmirror.cc/', 'phpexperts.pro', 'https://www.paypal.com/', 'www.example.com');

foreach ($links as &$link)
{
    // Prepend "http://" to any link missing the HTTP protocol text.
    if (preg_match('|^https*://|', $link) === 0)
    {
        $link = 'http://' . $link . '/';
    }
}

print_r($links);

/* Output:

Array
(
    [0] => http://www.redditmirror.cc/
    [1] => http://phpexperts.pro/
    [2] => https://www.paypal.com/
    [3] => http://www.example.com/
)
*/

thanks hopeseeker, but doesnt that just match what is in the $links array eg. http://www.redditmirror.cc/, etc instead of searching the page for any links that dont have http or https? — user443873, Sep 09 '10 at 23:47

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 10 '10 at 11:15

1

Maybe it suffices to just change the base URI of the document with the BASE element:

<base href="http://example.com/link/">

With this the new base URI is http://example.com/link/ instead of the URI of the document. That means, every relative URI is resolved from http://example.com/link/ instead of the document’s URI.

answered Sep 10 '10 at 11:15

Gumbo

643,351
109
780
844

I was just about to put this up when I saw it pop up. – Joel Etherton Sep 10 '10 at 11:18

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 10 '10 at 10:16

You could always use output buffering at the top of your page with a callback that reformats your hrefs to how you'd like them:

function callback($buffer)
{
    return (str_replace(' href="/', ' href="http://domain.com/', $buffer));
}

ob_start('callback');

// rest of your page goes here

ob_end_flush();

score 0 · Answer 4 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:09

Because you left out critical details in your first question, here is the second answer.

Doing what @Nev Stokes says may work, but it will also get more than tags. You should never use regular expressions (or, worse, strp_replace) on HTML.

Instead, use the file_get_html() library and do this:

<?php
require 'simplehtmldom/simple_html_dom.php';

ob_start();
?>
<html>
    <body>
      <a id="id" href="/my_file.txt">My File</a>
      <a name="anchor_link" id="boo" href="mydoc2.txt">My Doc 2</a>
      <a href="http://www.phpexperts.pro/">PHP Experts</a>
    </body>
</html>
<?php
$output = ob_get_clean();
$html = str_get_html($output);

$anchors = $html->find('a');
foreach ($anchors as &$a)
{
    if (preg_match('|^https*://|', $a->href) === 0)
    {
        // Make sure first char is /.
        if ($a->href[0] != '/')
        {
            $a->href = '/' . $a->href;
        }

        $a->href = 'http://www.domain.com' . $a->href;
    }
}

echo $html->save();

Output:

<html>
    <body>
      <a id="id" href="http://www.domain.com/my_file.txt">My File</a>
      <a name="anchor_link" id="boo" href="http://www.domain.com/mydoc2.txt">My Doc 2</a>
      <a href="http://www.phpexperts.pro/">PHP Experts</a>
    </body>
</html>

PHP - Prepend a url to all links with no http or https

4 Answers4

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