Question

I have a search engine using PHP/MySQL. I use this code to display the results from MySQL:

echo "<table width='300px'>
   <h4><a href='$url'><b>$title</b></a><br />
   $desc<br>
   <font color='red'>$url</font></table></h4>
   ";
   }
?>

However, if I add a URL (for example www.google.com) and I click on the title, it links me to http://mysite.com/www.google.com, instead of http://www.google.com.

How can I solve this?

Answer 1

Your $url is “www.google.com”, which is not a complete URL.

Consequently, your HTML looks like this (you should have posted the resulting HTML, really, as PHP has nothing to do with this):

<table width='300px'>
<h4><a href='www.google.com'><b>sometitle</b></a><br />
somedescription<br>
<font color='red'>www.google.com</font></table></h4>

www.google.com is not a full URL, and so your browser is treating it as a relative path, and thus prepending the current domain.

Your $url should be a full URL, like "http://www.google.com".