WordPress function – Check If URL Contains http://, Add It

Here’s your quick snippet for the day.  Yesterday, I was using Advanced Custom Fields text field to enter data and populate it on the frontend.  The issue was that users would be populating this field themselves and I wouldn’t know whether the URL contained the initial http:// protocol.  To solve this, a quick addition to my functions.php file in WordPress did the trick.  Here’s the function:

function addhttp($url) {
 if (!preg_match("~^(?:f|ht)tps?://~i", $url)) {
 $url = "http://" . $url;
 }
 return $url;
}

Once the above function was added I would utilize it on my theme using something like the following.  Note I am using Advanced Custom Fields here and pulling in a link to a users Facebook:

<a href="<?php echo addhttp(get_field('facebook_link', 'option')); ?>" target="_blank">Link To Facebook</a>

Now whether my client enters their Facebook URL with or without the http:// or https:// protocol, my link will function correctly.