url string validation

[Anon]

Hello

I'd like to validate an URL, passed as a string
I had the following ereg, it's working fine but only with "1st level"URL's (ie www.blah.com or http://www.blah.com or anything without a /mydoc.html)
$ret = ereg(
'^{(http://){0,1}'.}
'(([a-z0-9_]|\-)+\.)+'.
'[a-z]{2,4}$',
$string);

So has anyone some ereg ready made for checking complete urls? (not necessarily if the page exists, just the string...)

thanks

greg

[brandonschnell]

about the only thing you could check i would think is if it has an ip address or dns name somewhere in the string. i'd be curious also as to how other people have done this.

heres some valid URLs (ignoring the fact that that user doesn't even need the http:// or that it could be https://):

http://yahoo.com
http://www.yahoo.com
http://www.yahoo.com/r/ci

or how bout this:

http://www.phpbuilder.com:read.php3num=2&id=130287&thread=130287@216.32.74.55:80/r/ci

which will take you to a yahoo site.

[xzilla]

there are some functions in php like checkdnsrr and gethostbyname that can be used for this type of thing if you want to take it that far. I believe there are some libraries for this in the php resource index.

[Anon]

actually i just wanted to check the string validity, not the fact that it was reachable
but as Brandon pointed out in his last url exemple, there's not much to check. (maybe except some caracters like ô i suppose)