I am have a form that requests a user to submit a website and then on a different page I send a mysql query to retrieve that website an and turn it into a link by doing this in PHP (V=5.6)
$link = '<a href=' . $school_website .' target="_blank">' . $school_website . '</a>';
the problem is that when i try to click this link, instead of sending me to www.google.com for example, it directs me to www.mydomain.com/www.google.com.
I fixed it originally by using substr to see if the first part was "www" and if it was adding "http://" to it and it worked but now i realize that not all websites will start out with that.
I have tried googling this problem but Im not quite sure how to word the problem so I am not getting anything.
My apologies if this is a duplicate. I did not see anything here that fits my problem, so any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
Could always check if it has http/s:// with regex, if it hasn't then add http:// and the link will work as it should. Or make it ugly but simple.
Simplest way is to remove any protocol and prepend // - that would mark the link as absolute and adopt your current protocol. Even if it didn't have http/s:// it would work as it should.
$school_website = '//' . str_ireplace(['https://', 'http://'], '', $school_website);
Example: https://google.com becomes //google.com google.com becomes //google.com www.google.com becomes //www.google.com
In any of the above cases it would become a absolute url.
A better but longer way would be to validate the url with regex.
You need http:// or https:// at the beginning of the URL of external links - in fact that should be part of your variable "$school_website", and if that one is for example retrieved from a database, that value has to be changed in the database.
Until you add http:// or https://in front of url. It will remain the relative
Like if you re on www.mydomain.com and your href attribute value is www.google.com, The attribute value remain the relative and will target to you url.