How to check if a URL is valid

Question

How can I check if a string is a valid URL?

For example:

http://hello.it => yes
http:||bra.ziz, => no

If this is a valid URL

Answer 1

In general,

/^#{URI::regexp}$/

will work well, but if you only want to match http or https, you can pass those in as options to the method:

/^#{URI::regexp(%w(http https))}$/

That tends to work a little better, if you want to reject protocols like ftp://.