Question

I’m making a link and text service, but I have a problem, which is: there is only 1 input text form, and the user could paste something like this:
http:// asdf .com – which would register as a link, or ‘asdf http:// test .com‘ because of the http://, it would register as a url, or
asdf – which would register as a string, because it doesn’t contain http://

BUT my problem arises when the user writes something like:
asdf http://asdf.com, which in my current program outputs a “url” value. I’ve been experimenting for about an hour now, and I’ve got 3 bits of code (they were all in the same document being commented, so forgive me if they give errors!)

    <?
    $str = $_POST['paste'];
    if(stristr($str, "http://")) {
        $type = "url"; 
    }
    if(stristr($str, "https://")) { 
        $type = "url";
    }
    if($type!="url") { 
        $type = "string";
    } 
    ?>

Next:

<?
    $type = "url";
        if($type=="url"){
        $t = substr($str, 8);
        if(stristr($t, "https://")==$t){
        $type = "url";}
        if(stristr($t, "https://")==$t){ 
        $type = "url";}
        if(stristr($t, "http://")!=$t){
        $type = "string";}
        if(stristr($t, "https://")!=$t){
        $type = "string";}
        } 
        echo $type;
        ?>

Next:

<?    
$url = "hasttp://cake.com";
    if(stristr($url, "http://")=="") {
    $type = "string"; } else { 
    $type = "url"; 
    $sus = 1;}
    if(stristr($url, "http://")==$url) { 
    $type = "url"; }
    if($sus==1) { 
    $r = substr($url, 7);
    if(stristr($r,"http://")!="http://") { 
    $type = "url"; }
    if($r=="") {
    $type = "string";
    }
    }
    echo $type;
?>

I have no clue how I could go about classifying a string like ‘asdf http://asdf.com‘ as a string, whilst classifying ‘asdf‘ as a string, and classifying ‘http://asdf.com‘ as a url.. Another idea I haven’t tried yet is strpos, but that’s what I’m working on now.

Any ideas?

Thanks alot! 🙂

Some parts of this question are getting cut off for some reason, apologies!

Answer 1

$type = '';
if (preg_match('%^https?://[^\s]+$%', $url)) {
    $type = 'url';
} else {
    $type = 'string';
}

This will match any value which starts with http:// or https://, and does not contain any space in it as type url. If the value does not start with http:// or https://, or it contains a space in it, it will be type string.