How to remove http:// or https:// from a URL in JavaScript

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The recommended way to remove http or https from an URL in Javascript is to use the built-in URL object and access the various parts of the URL that way. Alternatively, you can use the String.replace() function with a regular expression and replace it with an empty string.

The URL class is supported in every major browser these days and is recommended for parsing URLs as well as accessing their various components. I think this is a lot better than trying to use a regular expression since there’s less likelihood you’ll forget an obscure edge case. Also, since it’s part of Javascript, it’s a very well-tested piece of code, unlike a regular expression you just threw together (no offense).

Get just the host

If you just want to get the host from the URL, do the following:

const raw_url = "https://www.example.com";
const url = new URL(raw_url);

console.log(url.host)
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In the above code, we use https://www.example.com as our target URL, and assign it to the raw_url variable. Then, we construct a URL object out of it and assign that to the url variable. Finally, we print out just the host property of that URL object, which gives us the following output:

www.example.com

Get the host and path

If the URL has a path portion to it that you also want, you can append the pathname property of the URL object to the host property like this:

const raw_url = "https://www.example.com/foo/bar";
const url = new URL(raw_url);

console.log(url.host + url.pathname)
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Which will give you the following:

www.example.com/foo/bar

Use a regular expression and the String.replace() function

If you’re dead set on using a regex instead of doing it the easy, well-tested, and robust way… here’s how you do that:

const raw_url = "https://www.example.com/foo/bar";

console.log(raw_url.replace(/https?:\/\//, ""))
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Using the same URL from the previous example, we make a regular expression that matches “http://” or “https://” (note the question mark after the “s”), and replace it with an empty string. That gives us the same result:

www.example.com/foo/bar

This will not match any random URI such as sftp://whatever. This is only going to work for http or https URLs, which is another reason I highly recommend you just use the built-in URL class.

Conclusion

To remove the protocol portion (http:// or https:// usually) from a URL in Javascript, you should use the built in URL class. If you’re confident you aren’t going to screw it up, you can use the String.replace method with a regex matching the protocol and replace it with an empty string.