Is there a URL validator on .Net?

Question

Is there a method to validate URLs in .Net (or ASP.Net, or ASP.Net MVC)?

Answer 1

You can create a new Uri-object, if an exception is thrown, the url is malformed.

public static bool IsValidUri(String uri)
{
        try
        {
            new Uri(uri);
            return true;
        }
        catch (UriFormatException ex)
        {
            return false;
        }
    }

Answer 2

static bool IsValidUri(string urlString) {
   try {
      new Uri(urlString);
      return true;
   } catch {
      return false;
   }
}

Answer 3

A faster way (probably) than using try/catch functionality would be to use Regex. If you had to validate 1000s of URLs catching the exception multiple times would be slow.

Here's a link to sample Regex- use Google to find more.

Answer 4

You can use the Uri.TryCreate to validate an URL:

public bool IsValidUri(string uri)
{
    Uri validatedUri;
    return Uri.TryCreate(uri, UriKind.RelativeOrAbsolute, out validatedUri);
}

The comments suggest that TryCreate just moves the exception handling one level down. However, I checked the source code and found that this is not the case. There is no try/catch inside TryCreate, it uses a custom parser which should not throw.