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

Peter's Regex doesn't look right to me for many reasons. It allows all kinds of special characters in the domain name and doesn't test for much.

Frankie's function looks good to me and you can build a good regex from the components if you don't want a function, like so:

^(http://|https://)(([a-z0-9]([-a-z0-9]*[a-z0-9]+)?){1,63}\.)+[a-z]{2,6}

Untested but I think that should work.

Also, Owen's answer doesn't look 100% either. I took the domain part of the regex and tested it on a Regex tester tool http://erik.eae.net/playground/regexp/regexp.html

I put the following line:

(\S*?\.\S*?)

in the "regexp" section and the following line:

-hello.com

under the "sample text" section.

The result allowed the minus character through. Because \S means any non-space character.

Note the regex from Frankie handles the minus because it has this part for the first character:

[a-z0-9]

Which won't allow the minus or any other special character.