Question

I am having some trouble performing the following operation..

http://www.google.com –> http://www.google.com/
https://google.com –> http://www.google.com/
google.com –> http://www.google.com/

I am trying to remove https:// or http://, ensure that www. is added to the beginning of the URL, and then add a trailing slash to the URL if it does not exist.

Feeling like I’ve gotten the majority of this figured out but I can’t get str_replace() to work how I’d like it to.

To my understanding this is how to use str_replace:

$string = 'Hello friends';
str_replace('friends', 'enemies', $string);
echo $string;
// outputs 'Hello enemies' on the page

Here is what I have so far:

$url = 'http://www.google.com';

echo reformat_url($url);

function reformat_url($url) {
    if ( substr( $url, 0, 7 ) == 'http://' || substr( $url, 0, 8 ) == 'https://' ) { // if http:// or https:// is at the beginning of the url
        $remove = array('http://', 'https://');
        foreach ( $remove as $r ) {
            if ( strpos( $url, $r ) == 0 ) {
                str_replace($r, '', $url); // remove the http:// or https:// -- can't get this to work
            }
        }
    }
    if ( substr( $url, 0, 4 ) != 'www.') { // if www. is not at the beginning of the url
        $url = 'www.' . $url; // prepend www. to the beginning
    }
    if ( substr( $url, -1 ) !== '/' ) { // if trailing slash does not exist
        $url = $url . '/';  // add trailing slash
    }
    return $url; // return the formatted url
}

Any assistance on a way to format the URL would be greatly appreciated; also I’m more curious regarding what I am doing wrong with str_replace to remove http:// or https://. If anyone could offer some insight as to what I am doing incorrectly it’d be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Do

$url = str_replace($r, '', $url);

instead of

str_replace($r, '', $url);

because str_replace returns a new string; it doesn’t change $url.