a href adds default URL with the given echo URL

Question

I am a little stuck in one situation. I am removing some errors from my site and got one unexpected error here below is my code:-

<?PHP
$release_web_url = get_post_meta( get_the_ID(), '_links', true );
print_r($release_web_url) ; ?>

and the output of this code is:

Array ( [0] => Array ( [name] => Website [url] =>www.google.com ) ) 

I only want to echo the array URL value in the anchor HTML tag. So I did this coding below:

foreach($release_web_url as $item): ?>
    <a href="<?php echo $item['url']; ?>">Website</a>
<?php endforeach;

now instead of getting anchor link = www.google.com | I got anchor link = 192.168.1.50/jobifylocal/www.google.com | that thing doesn't make any sense adding the other URL automatically in-front of the given URL.

Answer 1

You’ve forgotten the https://. This will happen in any HTML where you don’t add the protocol to a URL. Nothing to do with WordPress.

However, you should use esc_url() when outputting user entered values into a link, to make sure the output is a valid URL, even if the user makes this same mistake:

<a href="<?php echo esc_url( $item['url'] ); ?>">Website</a>