URL regex validation

Question

i made that:

 /^(http[s]?://){0,1}(www.){0,1}[a-zA-Z0-9\.\-]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,5}[\.]{0,1}

and checked it with a validator but on my page it is not working:

var re = /^(http[s]?://){0,1}(www.){0,1}[a-zA-Z0-9\.\-]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,5}[\.]{0,1};
if (!re.test(url)) { 
    alert("url error");
    return false;
}

i get this error

Webpage error details

User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E)
Timestamp: Tue, 30 Nov 2010 14:23:10 UTC


Message: Expected ')' in regular expression
Line: 781
Char: 23
Code: 0
URI: http://*************************

Answer 1

I will post, although the question has been accepted.

That regex is still incomplete.

http://www.-1-.de is not a valid domain name but would pass your test.

Here's what I use:

~^
(?:ht|f)tps?://

(?:[a-z0-9] (?:[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9])?      \.)*

(?:[a-z0-9][a-z0-9-]{0,62}[a-z0-9])
(?:\.[a-z]{2,5}){1,2}

$~ix

Covers http(s), ftp(s) and .co.uk TLDs and the like. Also covers subdomains which can be 1 character in length (m.example.com for mobile versions of webpages) but will not allow m-.example.com.

Surely some might object as to the regex's completeness, since .pro TLDs require at least 4 characters as a domain name. ;-)

Also IDN domain names will only pass my regex after conversion (i.e. in the "xn--" format).