Best way to check if a URL is valid

Question

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');
}

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")

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";
}

function is_url($uri){
    if(preg_match( '/^(http|https):\\/\\/[a-z0-9_]+([\\-\\.]{1}[a-z_0-9]+)*\\.[_a-z]{2,5}'.'((:[0-9]{1,5})?\\/.*)?$/i' ,$uri)){
      return $uri;
    }
    else{
        return false;
    }
}

Personally I would like to use regular expression here. Bellow code perfectly worked for me.

$baseUrl     = url('/'); // for my case https://www.xrepeater.com
$posted_url  = "home";
// Test with one by one
/*$posted_url  = "/home";
$posted_url  = "xrepeater.com";
$posted_url  = "www.xrepeater.com";
$posted_url  = "http://www.xrepeater.com";
$posted_url  = "https://www.xrepeater.com";
$posted_url  = "https://xrepeater.com/services";
$posted_url  = "xrepeater.dev/home/test";
$posted_url  = "home/test";*/

$regularExpression  = "((https?|ftp)\:\/\/)?"; // SCHEME Check
$regularExpression .= "([a-z0-9+!*(),;?&=\$_.-]+(\:[a-z0-9+!*(),;?&=\$_.-]+)?@)?"; // User and Pass Check
$regularExpression .= "([a-z0-9-.]*)\.([a-z]{2,3})"; // Host or IP Check
$regularExpression .= "(\:[0-9]{2,5})?"; // Port Check
$regularExpression .= "(\/([a-z0-9+\$_-]\.?)+)*\/?"; // Path Check
$regularExpression .= "(\?[a-z+&\$_.-][a-z0-9;:@&%=+\/\$_.-]*)?"; // GET Query String Check
$regularExpression .= "(#[a-z_.-][a-z0-9+\$_.-]*)?"; // Anchor Check

if(preg_match("/^$regularExpression$/i", $posted_url)) { 
    if(preg_match("@^http|https://@i",$posted_url)) {
        $final_url = preg_replace("@(http://)+@i",'http://',$posted_url);
        // return "*** - ***Match : ".$final_url;
    }
    else { 
          $final_url = 'http://'.$posted_url;
          // return "*** / ***Match : ".$final_url;
         }
    }
else {
     if (substr($posted_url, 0, 1) === '/') { 
         // return "*** / ***Not Match :".$final_url."<br>".$baseUrl.$posted_url;
         $final_url = $baseUrl.$posted_url;
     }
     else { 
         // return "*** - ***Not Match :".$posted_url."<br>".$baseUrl."/".$posted_url;
         $final_url = $baseUrl."/".$final_url; }
}

Actually... filter_var($url, FILTER_VALIDATE_URL); doesn't work very well. When you type in a real url, it works but, it only checks for http:// so if you type something like "http://weirtgcyaurbatc", it will still say it's real.