is URL valid or not [duplicate]

Answer 1

<?php

$url = "http://stack*overflow.org";


if(filter_var($url, FILTER_VALIDATE_URL) === FALSE)
{
        echo "Not valid";
}else{
        echo "VALID";
}
?>

this does not check tlds though

Answer 2

You can check whether URL is valid or not using parse_url function which would return false if URL is not valid and an array otherwise.

function isValidURL($url) { return (bool)parse_url($url); }

pretty easy way, huh? :)