php-regexHow to use PHP regex to match URL?

Using PHP regex to match URL is a powerful way to validate and parse URLs. The following example code block shows how to use regex to match a URL:

$url = 'http://www.example.com/path/to/page.html';
$pattern = '/^(https?:\/\/)?([\da-z\.-]+)\.([a-z\.]{2,6})([\/\w \.-]*)*\/?$/';

if(preg_match($pattern, $url)) {
    echo 'The URL is valid';
} else {
    echo 'The URL is not valid';
}

The output of the example code is:

The URL is valid

Code explanation

• $url: a string containing the URL to be matched
• $pattern: a regex pattern to match the URL
• preg_match(): a PHP function to match a regex pattern against a string

Helpful links

• PHP Regex
• Regular Expressions

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