Question

I am not very good with regular experessions and need a pattern to only allow URLS that begin with HTTP://www.

I have found lots of examples for URLS but they all seem over compliated and I’m sure it should be very simple. Can anyone help?

Answer 1

HTTP://www – they must start with that? ok. that’s your regular expression. throw case insensitive on it and you’re all set.

Things get interesting with regular expressions when you should ‘accept’ a string that can change. do you need to allow ‘https’ ? will you have an authorization section in the url before the domain? (you would know already if you did) that’s when a Regex can get complicated.

Edit

there could be a better way, but I haven’t done this in an XSD in a while. This will match

<xsd:simpleType name="ProdNumType">
  <xsd:restriction base="xsd:string">
    <xsd:pattern value="[hH][tT]{2}[pP]://[wW]{3}.*"/>
  </xsd:restriction>
</xsd:simpleType>