How To Validate URL In PHP With Regex

Hello Guys,

In this tutorial we will see how to validate URL in PHP with regex. also you can implement in laravel or php. here we will give you example of validate url with regular expression and without regular expression so you can both way to implement validate url in php or laravel.

When a URL is submitted from a form input by the user, it is very important to check this URL is valid or not before taking any action on it. So here we will provide the simple PHP code to validate URL in PHP.

PHP provide filter_var() inbuilt function with FILTER_VALIDATE_URL filter. So, we can easily validates a URL in PHP using javascript regex or regular expression .

Example : PHP FILTER_VALIDATE_URL Filter

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<body>

<?php
// Variable to check
$url = "https://www.websolutionstuff.com";

// Validate url
if (filter_var($url, FILTER_VALIDATE_URL)) {
  echo("Enter URL is a valid URL");
} else {
  echo("Enter URL is not a valid URL");
}
?>

</body>
</html>

Possible flags of validate URL in PHP

FILTER_FLAG_HOST_REQUIRED - URL must include host name (like https://www.websolutionstuff.com)
FILTER_FLAG_PATH_REQUIRED - URL must have a path after the domain name (like www.websolutionstuff.com/post)

Example : Validate URL With Regex

Above function is simply check URL validation. If you want to check or validate URL manually or more securely then you can use regular expression. So here I will give example of code.

<?php 

$regex = "((https?|ftp)\:\/\/)?";
$regex .= "([a-z0-9+!*(),;?&=\$_.-]+(\:[a-z0-9+!*(),;?&=\$_.-]+)?@)?";
$regex .= "([a-z0-9-.]*)\.([a-z]{2,3})";
$regex .= "(\:[0-9]{2,5})?";
$regex .= "(\/([a-z0-9+\$_-]\.?)+)*\/?";
$regex .= "(\?[a-z+&\$_.-][a-z0-9;:@&%=+\/\$_.-]*)?";
$regex .= "(#[a-z_.-][a-z0-9+\$_.-]*)?";

$url = 'https://websolutionstuff.com/';

if (preg_match("/^$regex$/i", $url)) {
   echo('Enter URL is a valid URL');
}