Small regular expression question

rubyonrails-talk
1

I'm looking to write a regular expression that will match valid URLs. My problem is that it almost works, except it accepts URLs with / in the middle of them, suchs as: http://www.ruby/rails.com

It looks (to me) like my regular expression should not match strings like that, but it does. Here is the regular expression:

.match(/^((http|https):\/\/)?[a-z0-9]+([\-\.]{1}[a-z0-9]+)*\.(\w+).*$/ix)

How can I make it not accept URLs with / in the middle of them?

2

Google's your friend here. "validate url with regular expression".

3

I'm looking to write a regular expression that will match valid URLs. My problem is that it almost works, except it accepts URLs with / in
the middle of them, suchs as: http://www.ruby/rails.com

It looks (to me) like my regular expression should not match strings like that, but it does. Here is the regular expression:

.match(/^((http|https):\/\/)?[a-z0-9]+([\-\.]{1}[a-z0-9]+)*\.(\w+).* $/ix)

How can I make it not accept URLs with / in the middle of them?

for the record, the problem here is .* at the end ^((http|https):\/\/)?[a-z0-9]+([\-\.]{1}[a-z0-9]+)*\.(\w+) matches against http://www.ruby and the remainder (/rails.com) trivially matches against .*

Fred

4

Frederick Cheung wrote:

5

I'd check out the ruby URI module:

http://www.ruby-doc.org/core/classes/URI.html

It's a more complex problem than it appears at first glance.

good luck!