Question

I have some links in which people did not add the protocol to. I.e., http://www.stackoverflow.com. If the link begins with http://www., I want to replace it with ‘http://www.’.

How can I do this with JavaScript regular expressions?

I tried the code below, but I can’t seem to match the pattern ‘doesn’t start with [A-z]+://www.’.

The links are mixed in with text.

jQuery(document).ready(function () {       
    jQuery('.myClass').each(function (index) {
        var temp = wwwify(jQuery(this).text());
        jQuery(this).html(temp);
    });
});

function wwwify(text) {
    var regex = /(?!\b([A-z]+:\/\/))www\./igm;
    return text.replace(regex, 'http://www.');
}

Answer 1

Since I haven’t found any suitable regex solutions through SO or elsewhere, just using regular javascript replace may be the best solution.

For now I’m making two passes through the text:

function wwwLineBeginsWith(text) { 
    var regex = /^www./gi; 
    return text.replace(regex, 'http://'); 
} 

function wwwWordBeginsWith(text) { 
    var regex = /\swww./gi; return text.replace(regex, 'http://'); 
}

var test1 = 'www.test2.com';
test1 = wwwLineBeginsWith(test1);
test1 = wwwWordBeginsWith(test1);

console.log(wwwWordBeginsWith(test1));