The Hostname Regex

The approved answer validates invalid hostnames containing multiple dots (example..com). Here is a regex I came up with that I think exactly matches what is allowable under RFC requirements (minus an ending "." supported by some resolvers to short-circuit relative naming and force FQDN resolution).

Spec:

<hname> ::= <name>*["."<name>]
<name> ::= <letter-or-digit>[*[<letter-or-digit-or-hyphen>]<letter-or-digit>]

Regex:

^([a-zA-Z0-9](?:(?:[a-zA-Z0-9-]*|(?<!-)\.(?![-.]))*[a-zA-Z0-9]+)?)$

I've tested quite a few permutations myself, I think it is accurate.

This regex also does not do length validation. Length constraints on labels betweens dots and on names are required by RFC, but lengths can easily be checked as second and third passes after validating against this regex, by checking full string length, and by splitting on "." and validating all substrings lengths. E.g., in JavaScript, label length validation might look like: "example.com".split(".").reduce(function (prev, curr) { return prev && curr.length <= 63; }, true).

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Alternative Regex (without negative lookbehind, courtesy of the HTML Living Standard):

^[a-zA-Z0-9](?:[a-zA-Z0-9-]{0,61}[a-zA-Z0-9])?(?:\.[a-zA-Z0-9](?:[a-zA-Z0-9-]{0,61}[a-zA-Z0-9])?)*$

^(?=.{1,255}$)[0-9A-Za-z](?:(?:[0-9A-Za-z]|-){0,61}[0-9A-Za-z])?(?:\.[0-9A-Za-z](?:(?:[0-9A-Za-z]|-){0,61}[0-9A-Za-z])?)*\.?$

Take a look at the following question. A few of the answers have regex expressions for host names

• Regular expression to match DNS hostname or IP Address?

Could you specify what language you want to use this regex in? Most languages / systems have slightly different regex implementations that will affect people's answers.

Your answer was relatively close.

But see

• RFC 2396 Section 3.2.2
• JaredPar's reference to this answer is referring to Regexp/Common/URI/RFC2396.pm source.

For a hostname RE, that perl module produces

(?:(?:(?:(?:[a-zA-Z0-9][-a-zA-Z0-9]*)?[a-zA-Z0-9])[.])*(?:[a-zA-Z][-a-zA-Z0-9]*[a-zA-Z0-9]|[a-zA-Z])[.]?)

I would modify to be more accurate as:

(?:(?:(?:(?:[a-zA-Z0-9][-a-zA-Z0-9]{0,61})?[a-zA-Z0-9])[.])*(?:[a-zA-Z][-a-zA-Z0-9]{0,61}[a-zA-Z0-9]|[a-zA-Z])[.]?)

Optionally anchoring the ends with ^$ to ONLY match hostnames.

I don't think a single RE can accomplish an full validation because, according to Wikipedia, there is a 255 character length restriction which i don't think can be included within that same RE, at least not without a ton of changes, but it's easy enough to just check the length <= 255 before running the RE.