NYCPHP Meetup

[Jayesh Sheth]

Hello all,

I came up with this Perl-style regular expression to validate URLs.

For example, if I want to match "http://www.google.com"
then I would test it against the following pattern:

#^([a-z]{3,}://)(([0-9a-z-]+\.)+[0-9a-z]{2,4})$#i

maybe I want to do something like this though:

#^([a-z]{3,5}://)(([0-9a-z-]+\.)+[0-9a-z]{2,4})$#i

so that
http://www.google.com

and
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org

and
https://www.amazon.com

are matched

but
httpsabc://www.somewhere.com

is not matched.

I primarily want to validate http:// links, though.

Another thought: I want to be flexible and allow the user to enter 
something like:

www.google.com

Should I first try to match against:
#^([a-z]{3,5}://)(([0-9a-z-]+\.)+[0-9a-z]{2,4})$#i

and then, if that fails against:
#^(([0-9a-z-]+\.)+[0-9a-z]{2,4})$#i

I also realize that something like
http://www.google.com/

will not be matched.

Any suggestions or corrections?

Thanks in advance!

Best Regards,

- Jay