I need a regEx to match general URLs.

Question

I need to test for general URLs using any protocol (http, https, shttp, ftp, svn, mysql and things I don't know about).

My first pass is this:

\w+://(\w+\.)+[\w+](/[\w]+)(\?[-A-Z0-9+&@#/%=~_|!:,.;]*)?

(PCRE and .NET so nothing to fancy)

Answer 1

adding that RegEx as a wiki answer:

[\w+-]+://([a-zA-Z0-9]+\.)+[[a-zA-Z0-9]+](/[%\w]+)(\?[-A-Z0-9+&@#/%=~_|!:,.;]*)?

option 2 (Re CMS)

^(([^:/?#]+):)?(//([^/?#]*))?([^?#]*)(\?([^#]*))?(#(.*))?

But that's to lax for anything sane so trimmed to make it more restrictive and to differentiate off other things.

proto      ://  name      : pass      @  server    :port      /path     ? args
^([^:/?#]+)://(([^/?#@:]+(:[^/?#@:]+)?@)?[^/?#@:]+(:[0-9]+)?)(/[^?#]*)(\?([^#]*))?

Answer 2

Similar questions:

• Question about URL Validation with Regex
• Java-How to detect the presence of URL in a string.
• Need a good regex to convert URLs to links but leave existing links alone

only to mention those I saw in the first page of URL tag...

Answer 3

According to RFC2396:

^(([^:/?#]+):)?(//([^/?#]*))?([^?#]*)(\?([^#]*))?(#(.*))?