PHP validation/regex for URL

Question

I've been looking for a simple regex for URLs, does anybody have one handy that works well? I didn't find one with the zend framework validation classes and have seen several implementations.

Answer 1

Use the filter_var() function to validate whether a string is URL or not:

var_dump(filter_var('example.com', FILTER_VALIDATE_URL));

It is bad practice to use regular expressions when not necessary.

EDIT: Be careful, this solution is not unicode-safe and not XSS-safe. If you need a complex validation, maybe it's better to look somewhere else.