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Checking for an external link in Antlers and Statamic

June 27th, 2023
2 min read
Statamic

This article is over 12 months old, and may be out of date or no longer relevant.

But you're here anyway, so give it a read see if it still applies to you.

This post talks about the is_external_url modifier which became available in Statamic 4.9.0, released June 2023.

When building your site's layout with Antlers in Statamic, there are dozens of modifiers available to help either modify a variable, or also perform checks or tests against its value.

One such modifier is the is_url modifier that allows you to perform a check as part of a conditional statement to test if the value is indeed a URL:

1{{ if link | is_url }}
2    <a href="{{ link }}">"link" is a URL</a>
3{{ /if }}

And within Statamic's facades is a URL Facade for all things URL - making slugs, making a URL absolute (or relative), and also checking if a value is an external URL:

1use Statamic\Facades\URL;
2 
3if (URL::isExternal($value)) {
4    echo "yep, $value is an external URL";
5}

The problem though: we can't use that PHP-based facade within Antlers.

So here's an idea... given Statamic is so easy to extend, why not create my own modifier? Well, I did. But also... because the Statamic team are so awesome at engaging and utilising community PRs, why not make a pull request and make this a core modifier? Surely I can't be the only person who needs to test if a URL is external within Antlers.

And I did just that... a pull request submitted, function renamed (I get it... I'd naturally call it that but thought it may be good to be more URL-centric, but no, be natural next time Marty), merged and now deployed.

If you update to 4.9.0, released June 26th 2023, you'll now have access to the new `is_external_url` modifier.

What does it do? It simply returns true when the variable is an external URL.

Within Statamic's src/Modifiers/CoreModifiers.php, the new isExternalUrl has been added:

1public function isExternalUrl($value)
2{
3    return Str::isUrl($value) && URL::isExternal($value);
4}

All we're doing here is ensuring:

  1. the value is a URL, and

  2. the URL is external

When both tests pass, you'll get true back. If either of these conditions fails, the result will be false.

You would use this in a conditional to check if the variable, such as link, is external:

1{{ if link | is_external_url }}
2    <a href="{{ link }}" target="_blank">External, baby!</a>
3{{ else }}
4    <a href="{{ link }}">Keep it internal</a>
5{{ /if }}

Or a little more inline, like if you were looping over a list of Links:

1<a href="{{ link }}"
2   {{ if link | is_external_url }} target="_blank" {{ /if }}
3   >{{ title }}</a>

Such a simple modifier, but hopefully one that helps other Statamic devs out there too!