CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpregex
Bagwell
Bagwell

Reputation: 2226

Completely validate URL with or without http or https

I've done some researching on validating URLs in PHP and found that there are many different answers on StackOverflow, some better than others, and some very old and outdated.

I have a field where users can input their website's url. The user should be able to enter the URL in any form, for example:

example.com
www.example.com
http://example.com
http://www.example.com
https://example.com
https://www.example.com

PHP comes with a function to validate URLs, however, it marks the URL as invalid if it doesn't have http://.

How can I validate any sort of URL, with or without http:// or https://, that would ensure the URL is valid?

Thanks.

Upvotes: 7

Views: 20246

Answers (5)

Chris Russo
Chris Russo

Reputation: 480

The question is from a decade ago, and my answer might might not be applicable for all cases, but probably the best approach is to send a small request to the url and see if it works.

Upvotes: 0

Popouerk
Popouerk

Reputation: 11

You can create a custom validation rule then add the following method in it :

protected function prepareForValidation()
{
        $urlWithHttp = strpos($this->url, 'http') !== 0 ? "http://$this->url" : $this->url;

        $this->merge([
            'url' => $urlWithHttp,
        ]);

}

Upvotes: 0

AbraCadaver
AbraCadaver

Reputation: 78994

Use filter_var() as you stated, however, by definition a URL must contain a protocol. Using just http will check for https as well:

$url = strpos($url, 'http') !== 0 ? "http://$url" : $url;

Then:

if(filter_var($url, FILTER_VALIDATE_URL)) {
    //valid
} else {
    //not valid
}

Upvotes: 25

Daniel
Daniel

Reputation: 43

You could also let html validate the url:

Website: <input type="url" name="website" required pattern="https?://.+">

Upvotes: -2

James Binford
James Binford

Reputation: 2893

I've also seen this used:

$url = "http://example.com";
if (preg_match("/\b(?:(?:https?|ftp):\/\/|www\.)[-a-z0-9+&@#\/%?=~_|!:,.;]*[-a-z0-9+&@#\/%=~_|]/i", $url)) {
  echo "URL is valid";
}
else {
  echo "URL is invalid";
}

Source: http://codekarate.com/blog/validating-url-php

Upvotes: 3

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