Question

I’m using some code like this to grab the URL from an inbound link:

$inbound_url = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];

//then do some stuff writing the url to a database table, but....
//ONLY IF the url doesn't already exist in the table

Let’s say the link comes in from the same website, same webpage, but different only in the www. So I get this:
1) http://www.mysite.com/page.html
2) http://mysite.com/page.html

This shows up twice in my table since one has the www and one doesn’t.

Is there a way to parse the results of $_SERVER[‘HTTP_REFERER’]; to either:
1) add www. where it’s missing, OR
2) strip everything of …http://…www. or ..http://

Thanks in advance as always.

Answer 1

Sure you can. Some simple string manipulation and replacement should be all you need to remove the www from any URL –

$inbound_url = str_replace('http://www','http://',$inbound_url);

As defined in the documentation –

str_replace() – Replace all occurrences of the search string with the replacement string

Notice that I’m including the http:// in the search so that any other occurrence of the string www URL will remain untouched.