Nginx rewrite non-www-prefixed domain to www-prefixed domain

I see the Nginx HttpRewriteModule documentation has an example to rewrite a www-prefixed domain to a non-www-prefixed domain:

if ($host ~* www\.(.*)) {
  set $host_without_www $1;
  rewrite ^(.*)$ http://$host_without_www$1 permanent; # $1 contains '/foo', not 'www.mydomain.com/foo'
}

How can I do the reverse-- rewrite a non-www-prefixed domain to a www-prefixed domain? I thought maybe I could do something like the following but Nginx doesn't like the nested if statement.

if ($host !~* ^www\.) {                       # check if host doesn't start with www.
    if ($host ~* ([a-z0-9]+\.[a-z0-9]+)) {    # check host is of the form xxx.xxx (i.e. no subdomain)
        set $host_with_www www.$1;
        rewrite ^(.*)$ http://$host_with_www$1 permanent;
    }
}

Also I wanted this to work for any domain name without explicitly telling Nginx to rewrite domain1.com -> www.domain1.com, domain2.com -> www.domain2.com, etc. since I have a large number of domains to rewrite.