How do I add the http protocol to a link?

Question

This should be basic knowledge, but somehow it eludes me. It has been working fine up till now, but for some reason my code no longer adds the http protocol...

I have $model->www which contains www.some-page.no (plain text).

Up till now I've been outputting this as follows:

<a href="<?= $model->www; ?>> Click me </a>

Expected output should be http://www.some-page.no
but now I get http://my-local-machine.com/page/a/http://www.some-page.no

If I do <a href="http://<?= $model->www; ?>> Click me </a> it works fine. The problem is that I don't know if the URL already contains http:// .

Is there a Yii way or a PHP way of adding http protocol if the link does not have it? Or do I have to custom make a function that checks for the string http:// ?

The link is properly sanitized. So there is no need for htmlspecialchars or similar functions.

Answer 1

You can do this with parse_url

$url = 'www.google.be';
if (parse_url($url, PHP_URL_SCHEME) === null) $url = 'http://'.$url;

Answer 2

Just use str_replace :

<a href="http://<?php str_replace('http://', '', $model->www); ?>" Click me</a>

UPDATE: If you are also concerned about other protocols (see DarkBee's comment):

<a href="http://<?php str_replace(array('http://', 'https://', 'ftp://'), '', $model->www); ?>" Click me</a>