url regex without http://www

Question

i need a url regex which validates the url string without http://www. or https://www.

any ideas?

Solution

It would probably be a good idea to keep the www's intact in order to preserve the sub-domain. A regex pattern like this:

^([a-zA-Z0-9]+(\.[a-zA-Z0-9]+)+.*)$

would match a URL that is not prefixed by a protocol (http://,https://,ftp://,etc).

Comments

[Hinek]

give an example of the string you have and the string you want to extract ... or do you want to validate if the string is an url but does not start with www.?

[BC.]

It seems clear to me. OP wants a url regex pattern that doesn't match "www.". @fusion Why not take an existing one and remove that match from the beginning of the pattern?

[Lèse majesté]

He could have also meant a regex that strips http://www. from a URL. Since he doesn't specify a use case and apparently spent less than 10 seconds writing the question, it's hard to tell.

[input]

apologies for not being clear. i want the regex to validate the url string but without http://www. it should only validate google.com not http://www.google.com

[Lunivore]

Hi Fusion, do your URLs have ports, parameters, etc.?

[Kevin Sedgley]

Do you want to be able to extract URLs from a string, like gmail chat does, without having to specify 'http://' or 'www.'? So for instance boobi.es would be turned to [boobi.es](boobi.es)? I forsee a lonnnnng regex.

[sigint]

What if a website requires the www subdomain to be valid? Ex. www.example.com/ serves a page, but example.com/ 404's.

[input]

@lunivore, no. @kevin, yes something like that.

[input]

@sigint, i'm not removing http://www.. it'd be programmatically appended to the url which the user enters in the textbox. i don't want the user to enter http://www.

[Quentin]

So run your regular expression against "www." + what_the_user_enters. Hope you don't mind excluding https URIs.

[input]

thank you! as i said i'm not removing the www. it would be appended to the url which the user enters in the textbox.

[Joel Etherton]

That regex would allow silliness like subdomain.realdomain.Hambone^&&#$@$%^&* which wouldn't qualify.

[sigint]

@fusion What if example.com doesn't have a www subdomain? You shouldn't blindly prepend the www's. @Joel Etherton You are correct, this regex pattern would be VERY liberal when dealing with (what should be) GET parameters.

[FOOM]

also doesn't allow hyphens