Validate a hostname string

Question

Following up to Regular expression to match hostname or IP Address? and using Restrictions on valid host names as a reference, what is the most readable, concise way to matc

Answer 1

Per The Old New Thing, the maximum length of a DNS name is 253 characters. (One is allowed up to 255 octets, but 2 of those are consumed by the encoding.)

import re

def validate_fqdn(dn):
    if dn.endswith('.'):
        dn = dn[:-1]
    if len(dn) < 1 or len(dn) > 253:
        return False
    ldh_re = re.compile('^[a-z0-9]([a-z0-9-]{0,61}[a-z0-9])?$',
                        re.IGNORECASE)
    return all(ldh_re.match(x) for x in dn.split('.'))

One could argue for accepting empty domain names, or not, depending on one's purpose.

Answer 2

Complimentary to the @TimPietzcker answer. Underscore is a valid hostname character (but not for domain name) . While double dash is commonly found for IDN punycode domain(e.g. xn--). Port number should be stripped. This is the cleanup of the code.

import re
def is_valid_hostname(hostname):
    if len(hostname) > 255:
        return False
    hostname = hostname.rstrip(".")
    allowed = re.compile("(?!-)[A-Z\d\-\_]{1,63}(?<!-)$", re.IGNORECASE)
    return all(allowed.match(x) for x in hostname.split("."))

# convert your unicode hostname to punycode (python 3 ) 
# Remove the port number from hostname
normalise_host = hostname.encode("idna").decode().split(":")[0]
is_valid_hostname(normalise_host )

Answer 3

Don't reinvent the wheel. You can use a library, e.g. validators. Or you can copy their code:

Installation

pip install validators

Usage

import validators
if validators.domain('example.com')
    print('this domain is valid')

Answer 4

Process each DNS label individually by excluding invalid characters and ensuring nonzero length.

def isValidHostname(hostname):
    disallowed = re.compile("[^a-zA-Z\d\-]")
    return all(map(lambda x: len(x) and not disallowed.search(x), hostname.split(".")))

Answer 5

Here's a bit stricter version of Tim Pietzcker's answer with the following improvements:

• Limit the length of the hostname to 253 characters (after stripping the optional trailing dot).
• Limit the character set to ASCII (i.e. use [0-9] instead of \d).
• Check that the TLD is not all-numeric.

import re

def is_valid_hostname(hostname):
    if hostname[-1] == ".":
        # strip exactly one dot from the right, if present
        hostname = hostname[:-1]
    if len(hostname) > 253:
        return False

    labels = hostname.split(".")

    # the TLD must be not all-numeric
    if re.match(r"[0-9]+$", labels[-1]):
        return False

    allowed = re.compile(r"(?!-)[a-z0-9-]{1,63}(?<!-)$", re.IGNORECASE)
    return all(allowed.match(label) for label in labels)

Answer 6

I think this regex might help in Python: '^([a-zA-Z0-9]+(\.|\-))*[a-zA-Z0-9]+$'