With HTML5 url input validation assume url starts with http://

Question

HTML5 provides for automatic URL validation :-

<form>    <input type="url" name="someUrl"> </form> 

This will fail validation for URL's that don't have a protocol prefix - e.g. stackoverflow.com will fail while http://stackoverflow.com will pass.

How can I automatically add http:// to a url if there isn't already a protocol?

I could add a onblur event handler but is there a better way like some before validation event?

Answer 1

The code for this should not interrupt the user's action, but should instead wait until the user leaves the form field to check the input text for "http". So use "onblur" instead of "onkeyup".

Then, just see if the string contains "http" using indexOf. If not, it will return -1, which is falsey.

function checkURL (abc) {    var string = abc.value;    if (!~string.indexOf("http")) {      string = "http://" + string;    }    abc.value = string;    return abc  }

<form>    <input type="url" name="someUrl" onblur="checkURL(this)" />    <input type="text"/>  </form>

Fiddle

Answer 2

if you don't want the browser validation (it can vary between browsers) you can add the following novalidate attribute

<input type="url" name="someUrl"  formnovalidate="formnovalidate">  

else you might want to be more transparent about prefixing http:// by simply adding once someone starts to type or even to have http:// already typed into the box on the page load

(credit to editor who rightly points out that novalidate applies to form, while above overrides that, debit to creditor for approach to edit ;)