PHP validation/regex for URL

Question

I\'ve been looking for a simple regex for URLs, does anybody have one handy that works well? I didn\'t find one with the zend framework validation classes and have seen sev

Answer 1

I don't think that using regular expressions is a smart thing to do in this case. It is impossible to match all of the possibilities and even if you did, there is still a chance that url simply doesn't exist.

Here is a very simple way to test if url actually exists and is readable :

if (preg_match("#^https?://.+#", $link) and @fopen($link,"r")) echo "OK";

(if there is no preg_match then this would also validate all filenames on your server)