Special Characters: Matching the Protocol and Hostname

Regular expression to match the protocol

This part is easy. There aren’t that many protocols around, and since our testing strings are quite simple, we can say a protocol is either the string http, https, or ftp, followed by the “://” portion. This is how we can write that in a RegExp:

/(https?|ftp):\/\//g

To double-check what we’ve seen so far (and the new part with the OR operator), let’s break it down:

• We’re matching both http and https with the addition of the ? character after https ...