Check if a string starts with http using Javascript

Question

I\'ve been searching all over for an answer to this and all of the answers I\'ve found haven\'t been in JavaScript.

I need a way, in javascript, to check if a string sta

Answer 1

Refining previous answers a bit more, I used new RegExp(...) to avoid messy escapes, and also added an optional s.

var pattern = new RegExp('^(https?|ftp)://');

if(!pattern.test(url)) {
    url = "http://" + url;
}

var pattern = new RegExp('^(https?|ftp)://');


console.log(pattern.test('http://foo'));
console.log(pattern.test('https://foo'));
console.log(pattern.test('ftp://foo'));
console.log(pattern.test('bar'));