Regular expression for URL

Question

I have written regex to validate URL which could be either like

• example.com

• www.example.com

• http://www.example.com

Answer 1

when creating a regex for strict matching, you must make it sure it begins with '^' and finishes with '$'. Otherwise, the regex will see if it finds a substring which matches.

• '^' means match begin of line
• '$' means match end of line.

However, using a regex to match an URL is error prone : better rely on existing frameworks doing it better (there are a lot of potential traps in url, like parameters, unkown domains, url containing ip instead of domain....)