PHP Regex for fixing URLs

Question

I need to use regex to search a string and fix certain urls. I need to remove the beginning / from links like this one:

/admin.somedomain.com or /somedomain.com

There are a lot of other absolute urls so I can't just strip out any leading / characters. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

This is dealing with user entered text usually html from TinyMCE but sometimes from plain text boxes with and without other HTML (or I would handle it differently and deal with the links directly instead of having to search a string for them first). Unfortunately sometimes the urls are entered incorrectly for a href or img src etc.

I do want links like "/image.jpg" "/webapp/getfile?id=3354"

but not links like "/somedomain.com" "/admin.somedomain.com"

Here is an example of text I might need to clean up

<p><a href="/webapp/GetFile?id={2C59BC2D}"><img src="/wahelper/GetImage?id=308" alt="" width="100" height="100" /></a></p> <p><a href="/admin.somedomain.com">test</a></p>

Unless there is another way to do it. I am open to suggestions. — jncw
– jncw, Commented Aug 31, 2012 at 17:33
Regex may in part be your solution but overall I don't think regex is going to be your end all be all. Unless you can come up with something seriously intricate. I would likely take the approach where I would do a comparison of all the urls I have stored. Maybe splitting them at : and taking the first block and seeing if theres more than one / where if there is, leave it alone, then where there isn't remove the first char if that char is a / — chris
– chris, Commented Aug 31, 2012 at 17:34
if there is no : then I would see what the beginning chars are see if it has a // in it or a / — chris
– chris, Commented Aug 31, 2012 at 17:35
So how are you getting these links? From a database? Can we see that code? — woz
– woz, Commented Aug 31, 2012 at 17:45
Please edit your original question with enhancements, instead of adding details in comments -- it's easier to understand your questions that way. I'd like to see a list of URLs you are dealing with, so I can see what a regexp should match and what it shouldn't. Thanks. — vsh
– vsh, Commented Aug 31, 2012 at 22:43

smathy · Accepted Answer · 2012-08-31 23:16:34Z

0

Jeez, such a hard time to get a simple regex. Try this:

$str = preg_replace( "/^\/((?:admin\.)?[^.]+.(?:com|net|other_TLD_you_want))/i", "http://$1", $str);

Note that I've actually replace / with http:// because that's really what you want if you want the link to work. If you just strip off the / then the link will end up being a link to a local file in the current directory called admin.somedomain.com - which is probably not what you want.

Also note that you might want more TLDs than just com and net - add them as you want.

Also note that this won't work for other country TLDs like co.uk

answered Aug 31, 2012 at 23:16

smathy

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