Regex to check if valid URL that ends in .jpg, .png, or .gif

Question

(?:([^:/?#]+):)?(?://([^/?#]*))?([^?#]*\.(?:jpg|gif|png))(?:\?([^#]*))?(?:#(.*))?

That's a (slightly modified) version of the official URI parsing regexp from RFC 2396. It allows for #fragments and ?querystrings to appear after the filename, which may or may not be what you want. It also matches any valid domain, including localhost, which again might not be what you want, but it could be modified.

A more traditional regexp for this might look like the below.

^https?://(?:[a-z0-9\-]+\.)+[a-z]{2,6}(?:/[^/#?]+)+\.(?:jpg|gif|png)$
          |-------- domain -----------|--- path ---|-- extension ---|

EDIT See my other comment, which although isn't answering the question as completely as this one, I feel it's probably a more useful in this case. However, I'm leaving this here for karma-whoring completeness reasons.

Actually.

Why are you checking the URL? That's no guarantee what you're going to get is an image, and no guarantee that the things you're rejecting aren't images. Try performing a HEAD request on it, and see what content-type it actually is.

In general, you're better off validating URLs using built-in library or framework functions, rather than rolling your own regular expressions to do this - see What is the best regular expression to check if a string is a valid URL for details.

If you are keen on doing this, though, check out this question:

Getting parts of a URL (Regex)

Then, once you're satisfied with the URL (by whatever means you used to validate it), you could either use a simple "endswith" type string operator to check the extension, or a simple regex like

(?i)\.(jpg|png|gif)$

(http(s?):)|([/|.|\w|\s])*\.(?:jpg|gif|png)

This will mach all images from this string:

background: rgb(255, 0, 0) url(../res/img/temp/634043/original/cc3d8715eed0c.jpg) repeat fixed left top; cursor: auto;
<div id="divbg" style="background-color:#ff0000"><img id="bg" src="../res/img/temp/634043/original/cc3d8715eed0c.jpg" width="100%" height="100%" /></div>
background-image: url(../res/img/temp/634043/original/cc3d8715eed0c.png);
background: rgb(255, 0, 0) url(http://google.com/res/../img/temp/634043/original/cc3    _d8715eed0c.jpg) repeat fixed left top; cursor: auto;
background: rgb(255, 0, 0) url(https://google.com/res/../img/temp/634043/original/cc3_d8715eed0c.jpg) repeat fixed left top; cursor: auto;

Test your regex here: https://regex101.com/r/l2Zt7S/1

(http(s?):)([/|.|\w|\s|-])*\.(?:jpg|gif|png) worked really well for me.

This will match URLs in the following forms:

https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3894/15008518202_c265dfa55f_h.jpg
http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3894/15008518202_c265dfa55f_h.jpg
https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3894/15008518202-c265dfa55f-h.jpg
https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3894/15008518202.c265dfa55f.h.jpg
https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3894/15008518202_c265dfa55f_h.gif
http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3894/15008518202_c265dfa55f_h.gif
https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3894/15008518202-c265dfa55f-h.gif
https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3894/15008518202.c265dfa55f.h.gif
https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3894/15008518202_c265dfa55f_h.png
http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3894/15008518202_c265dfa55f_h.png
https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3894/15008518202-c265dfa55f-h.png
https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3894/15008518202.c265dfa55f.h.png

Check this regular expression against the URLs here: http://regexr.com/3g1v7

Here's the basic idea in Perl. Salt to taste.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use LWP::UserAgent;

my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;

@ARGV = qw(http://www.example.com/logo.png);

my $response = $ua->head( $ARGV[0] );

my( $class, $type ) = split m|/|, lc $response->content_type;

print "It's an image!\n" if $class eq 'image';

If you need to inspect the URL, use a solid library for it rather than trying to handle all the odd situations yourself:

use URI;

my $uri = URI->new( $ARGV[0] );

my $last = ( $uri->path_segments )[-1];

my( $extension ) = $last =~ m/\.([^.]+)$/g;

print "My extension is $extension\n";

Good luck, :)