Best way to check if a URL is valid

You can use a native Filter Validator

filter_var($url, FILTER_VALIDATE_URL);

Validates value as URL (according to » http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2396), optionally with required components. Beware a valid URL may not specify the HTTP protocol http:// so further validation may be required to determine the URL uses an expected protocol, e.g. ssh:// or mailto:. Note that the function will only find ASCII URLs to be valid; internationalized domain names (containing non-ASCII characters) will fail.

Example:

if (filter_var($url, FILTER_VALIDATE_URL) === FALSE) {
    die('Not a valid URL');
}

Using filter_var() will fail for urls with non-ascii chars, e.g. (http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guimarães). The following function encode all non-ascii chars (e.g. http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guimar%C3%A3es) before calling filter_var().

Hope this helps someone.

<?php

function validate_url($url) {
    $path = parse_url($url, PHP_URL_PATH);
    $encoded_path = array_map('urlencode', explode('/', $path));
    $url = str_replace($path, implode('/', $encoded_path), $url);

    return filter_var($url, FILTER_VALIDATE_URL) ? true : false;
}

// example
if(!validate_url("http://somedomain.com/some/path/file1.jpg")) {
    echo "NOT A URL";
}
else {
    echo "IS A URL";
}

Here is the best tutorial I found over there:

http://www.w3schools.com/php/filter_validate_url.asp

<?php
$url = "http://www.qbaki.com";

// Remove all illegal characters from a url
$url = filter_var($url, FILTER_SANITIZE_URL);

// Validate url
if (filter_var($url, FILTER_VALIDATE_URL) !== false) {
echo("$url is a valid URL");
} else {
echo("$url is not a valid URL");
}
?>

Possible flags:

FILTER_FLAG_SCHEME_REQUIRED - URL must be RFC compliant (like http://example)
FILTER_FLAG_HOST_REQUIRED - URL must include host name (like http://www.example.com)
FILTER_FLAG_PATH_REQUIRED - URL must have a path after the domain name (like www.example.com/example1/)
FILTER_FLAG_QUERY_REQUIRED - URL must have a query string (like "example.php?name=Peter&age=37")