Formatting URLs in the old Regex Interface

This page is for formatting regexes using an older interface. It will have a single field for the regex, not the 3-field version with subdomain, tld and path.

HTTPS and WWW

Since some URLs start with http, and others with https, and some of your visitors may have a browser extension that automatically turns all http URLs into https ones, it's occasionally very important to include both options within your regex. Here's how you would do that:

https?

The ? after the "s" means that there can be 0 or 1 "s" - meaning http and https are both included. The question mark only affects the ONE character in behind it, unless you put them inside parentheses, as you'll see in just a moment. Put this together with the escaped-slash we learned earlier, and you get:

https?:\/\/

The \/\/ pattern is the two // with escape slashes. A single slash would look like \/, and an optional slash would look like \/?

We don't need to escape the : because it's not a special character.

To include the "www." you would include the following part:

(www\.)?

The parentheses around the "www." mean (everything in here) - just like in Algebra class. We still have to escape the . and we add the ? at the end to show that it's not required, that there can be 0 or 1 "www."

Putting the Pieces Together

If the site we are using is http://www.website.com, our whole regex targeting it would look like:

https?:\/\/(www\.)?website\.com\/?

This will match:

http://website.com

https://website.com

http://www.website.com

https://www.website.com

http://website.com/

https://website.com/

http://www.website.com/

https://www.website.com/

Note that these URLs include all the combinations of http, https, www or no www, and the final /

The Beginning and The End

In this older interface, we also need to tell the regex where to stop and end. This is done by using two other special characters, ^ and $. The ^ marks the beginning of the regex, and the $ marks the end. Using the example from above, this would be your regex:

https?:\/\/(www\.)?website\.com\/?

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