Checking for relative vs absolute paths/URLs in PHP

Question

I need to implement functions to check whether paths and urls are relative, absolute, or invalid (invalid syntactically- not whether resource exists). What are the range of

Answer 1

This function is taken from Drupal

public function is_absolute($url)
{
    $pattern = "/^(?:ftp|https?|feed):\/\/(?:(?:(?:[\w\.\-\+!$&'\(\)*\+,;=]|%[0-9a-f]{2})+:)*
    (?:[\w\.\-\+%!$&'\(\)*\+,;=]|%[0-9a-f]{2})+@)?(?:
    (?:[a-z0-9\-\.]|%[0-9a-f]{2})+|(?:\[(?:[0-9a-f]{0,4}:)*(?:[0-9a-f]{0,4})\]))(?::[0-9]+)?(?:[\/|\?]
    (?:[\w#!:\.\?\+=&@$'~*,;\/\(\)\[\]\-]|%[0-9a-f]{2})*)?$/xi";

    return (bool) preg_match($pattern, $url);
}