Adding http:// to all links without a protocol

Question

I use VB.NET and would like to add http:// to all links that doesn't already start with http://, https://, ftp:// and so on.

"I want to add http here <a href=""www.google.com"" target=""_blank"">Google</a>,
but not here <a href=""http://www.google.com"" target=""_blank"">Google</a>."

It was easy when I just had the links, but I can't find a good solution for an entire string containing multiple links. I guess RegEx is the way to go, but I wouldn't even know where to start.

I can find the RegEx myself, it's the parsing and prepending I'm having problems with. Could anyone give me an example with Regex.Replace() in C# or VB.NET?

Any help appreciated!

What will you do if you are referencing a local site? Like Home EDIT: Too late... — Jan Sverre, Jan 25 '11 at 12:02
In this particular case it doesn't matter, but thanks for pointing it out. — Magnus Engdal, Jan 25 '11 at 12:10

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 18 '13 at 10:16

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C#

 result = new Regex("(href=\")([^(http|https|ftp)])", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase).Replace(input, "href=\"//$2");

answered Sep 18 '13 at 10:16

Vladimir Radzivil

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score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:22

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Quote RFC 1738:

"Scheme names consist of a sequence of characters. The lower case letters "a"--"z", digits, and the characters plus ("+"), period ("."), and hyphen ("-") are allowed. For resiliency, programs interpreting URLs should treat upper case letters as equivalent to lower case in scheme names (e.g., allow "HTTP" as well as "http")."

Excellent! A regex to match:

/^[a-zA-Z0-9+.-]+:\/\//

If that matches your href string, continue on. If not, prepend "http://". Remaining sanity checks are yours unless you ask for specific details. Do note the other commenters' thoughts about relative links.

EDIT: I'm starting to suspect that you've asked the wrong question... that you perhaps don't have anything that splits the text up into the individual tokens you need to handle it. See Looking for C# HTML parser

EDIT: As a blind try at ignoring all and just attacking the text, using case insensitive matching,

/(<a +href *= *")(.*?)(" *>)/

If the second back-reference matches /^[a-zA-Z0-9+.-]+:\/\//, do nothing. If it does not match, replace it with

$1 + "http://" + $2 + $3

This isn't C# syntax, but it should translate across without too much effort.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:22

Community

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answered Jan 25 '11 at 12:05

Jeff Ferland

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I got this far, it's the parsing and prepending I'm having problems with. Could you give me an example with Regex.Replace()? – Magnus Engdal Jan 25 '11 at 12:26
@EDIT That is correct, I don't have anything that splits up the text. I guess I'll take a look at the HTML parsers, but they seemed a bit heavy just to prepend http:// to links. Thanks :) – Magnus Engdal Jan 25 '11 at 13:01
Gave you a regexp solution, but I make no promises it behaves nicely. – Jeff Ferland Jan 25 '11 at 13:14
Also should consider you might not want to add `http://` to a link beginning with `//` – Charlie Gorichanaz Oct 16 '13 at 20:33

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 19 '12 at 22:22

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In PHP (should translate somewhat easily)

$text = preg_replace('/href="(?:(http|ftp|https)\:\/\/)?([^"]*)"/', 'href="http://$1"', $text);

answered Jan 19 '12 at 22:22

Larry Williamson

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score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Jan 25 '11 at 12:07

If you aren't concerned with potentially messing up local links, and you can always guarantee that the strings will be fully qualified domain names, then you can simply use the contains method:

Dim myUrl as string = "someUrlString".ToLower()

If Not myUrl.Contains("http://") AndAlso Not myUrl.Contains("https://") AndAlso Not myUrl.Contains("ftp://") Then

    'Execute your logic to prepend the proper protocol
    myUrl = "http://" & myUrl

End If

Keep in mind this omits a lot of holes regarding the checking of which protocol should be used in the addition and if the url is relative or not.

Edit: I chose specifically not to offer a RegEx solution since this is a simple check and RegEx is a little heavy for it (IMO).

Thanks, but I don't have any problems with a single URL. I want to parse a longer text with multiple links. — Magnus Engdal, Jan 25 '11 at 12:22

Adding http:// to all links without a protocol

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