Regex to match URL

This question was surprisingly difficult to find an answer for. The regexes I found were too complicated to understand, and anything more that a regex is overkill and too difficult to implement.

Finally came up with:

/(\S+\.(com|net|org|edu|gov)(\/\S+)?)/

Works with http://example.com, https://example.com, example.com, http://example.com/foo.

Explanation:

  • Looks for .com, etc.
  • Matches everything before it up to the space
  • Matches everything after it up to the space

$search  = "#^((?#
    the scheme:
  )(?:https?://)(?#
    second level domains and beyond:
  )(?:[\S]+\.)+((?#
    top level domains:
  )MUSEUM|TRAVEL|AERO|ARPA|ASIA|EDU|GOV|MIL|MOBI|(?#
  )COOP|INFO|NAME|BIZ|CAT|COM|INT|JOBS|NET|ORG|PRO|TEL|(?#
  )A[CDEFGILMNOQRSTUWXZ]|B[ABDEFGHIJLMNORSTVWYZ]|(?#
  )C[ACDFGHIKLMNORUVXYZ]|D[EJKMOZ]|(?#
  )E[CEGHRSTU]|F[IJKMOR]|G[ABDEFGHILMNPQRSTUWY]|(?#
  )H[KMNRTU]|I[DELMNOQRST]|J[EMOP]|(?#
  )K[EGHIMNPRWYZ]|L[ABCIKRSTUVY]|M[ACDEFGHKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ]|(?#
  )N[ACEFGILOPRUZ]|OM|P[AEFGHKLMNRSTWY]|QA|R[EOSUW]|(?#
  )S[ABCDEGHIJKLMNORTUVYZ]|T[CDFGHJKLMNOPRTVWZ]|(?#
  )U[AGKMSYZ]|V[ACEGINU]|W[FS]|Y[ETU]|Z[AMW])(?#
    the path, can be there or not:
  )(/[a-z0-9\._/~%\-\+&\#\?!=\(\)@]*)?)$#i";

Just cleaned up a bit. This will match only HTTP(s) addresses, and, as long as you copied all top level domains correctly from IANA, only those standardized (it will not match http://localhost) and with the http:// declared.

Finally you should end with the path part, that will always start with a /, if it is there.

However, I'd suggest to follow Cerebrus: If you're not sure about this, learn regexps in a more gentle way and use proven patterns for complicated tasks.

Cheers,

By the way: Your regexp will also match something.r and something.h (between |TO| and |TR| in your example). I left them out in my version, as I guess it was a typo.

On re-reading the question: Change

  )(?:https?://)(?#

to

  )(?:https?://)?(?#

(there is a ? extra) to match 'URLs' without the scheme.


This will get any url in its entirety, including ?= and #/ if they exist:

/[A-Za-z]+:\/\/[A-Za-z0-9\-_]+\.[A-Za-z0-9\-_:%&;\?\#\/.=]+/g

Not exactly what the OP asked for but this is a much simpler regular expression that does not need to be updated each time the IANA introduces a new TLD. I believe this is more adequate for most simple needs:

^(?:https?://)?(?:[\w]+\.)(?:\.?[\w]{2,})+$

no list of TLD, localhost is not matched, the number of subparts must be >= 2 and the length of each subpart must be >= 2 (fx: "a.a" will not match but "a.ab" will match).

Tags:

Regex

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