PHP Url Validation Error: http://https://example.com (aka https://https://example.com)

Question

I had this url regex pattern in place:

$pattern = "@\b(https?://[^\s()<>\[\]\{\}]{1,".$max_length_allowed_for_each_url."}(?:\([\w\d]+\)|([^[:punct:]\s]|/)))@";

It seemed to work pretty well at validating any URL I threw at it, until I realized that https://http://google.com (apparently even stackoverflow is considering that a valid URL (it made that URL clickable, not me, although it did remove one of the colons) so perhaps I am out of luck?) was a valid URL, when it certainly is not.

I did a little research... and learnt that I should be using filter_var instead of a regex for PHP URL validation anyways... and was disappointed to realize that it too is susceptible to this very same validation problem.

I could easily conquer it with:

str_replace(array("https://http://","http://https://"), array("http://","https://"), $url);

But... that just seems so wrong.

Dietrich Epp · Accepted Answer · 2011-11-23 07:54:26Z

2

Well, it is a valid URI. Technically. Look at the RFC for URIs if you don't believe me.

The path component of a URI can contain //.
http is a valid host name.
The port is allowed to be missing even if the : is present (it's specified as *digit, not 1*digit). (This is why Stack Overflow removed the colon -- it thought you were using the default port, so it removed it from the URI.)

I suggest writing a special case for this. In a separate step, check to see if the URI starts with https?://https?://, and fix it.

answered Nov 23, 2011 at 7:54

Dietrich Epp

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