A better way to validate URL in C# than try-catch?

Question

I\'m building an application to retrieve an image from internet. Even though it works fine, it is slow (on wrong given URL) when using try-catch statements in the applicatio

Answer 1

I wanted to check if the url also contains a domain extension, it needs to be a valid website url.

This is what i came up with:

 public static bool IsValidUrl(string url)
        {
            if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(url)) { return false;}

            if (!url.StartsWith("http://"))
            {
                url = "http://" + url;    
            }

            Uri outWebsite;

            return Uri.TryCreate(url, UriKind.Absolute, out outWebsite) && outWebsite.Host.Replace("www.", "").Split('.').Count() > 1 && outWebsite.HostNameType == UriHostNameType.Dns && outWebsite.Host.Length > outWebsite.Host.LastIndexOf(".") + 1 && 255 >= url.Length;
        }

I've tested the code with linqpad:

    void Main()
{
        // Errors
        IsValidUrl("www.google/cookie.png").Dump();
        IsValidUrl("1234").Dump();
        IsValidUrl("abcdef").Dump();
        IsValidUrl("abcdef/test.png").Dump();
        IsValidUrl("www.org").Dump();
        IsValidUrl("google").Dump();
        IsValidUrl("google.").Dump();
        IsValidUrl("google/test").Dump();
        IsValidUrl("User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/17.0").Dump();
        IsValidUrl("").Dump();
        IsValidUrl("Accept: application/json, text/javascript, */*; q=0.01").Dump();
        IsValidUrl("DNT: 1").Dump();

        Environment.NewLine.Dump();

        // Success
        IsValidUrl("google.nl").Dump();
        IsValidUrl("www.google.nl").Dump();
        IsValidUrl("http://google.nl").Dump();
        IsValidUrl("http://www.google.nl").Dump();
}

Results:

False False False False False False False False False False False False

True True True True