How can I validate a website URL in Perl? - perl

Question

I need a regular expression or module for validating the website URL using Perl.

Answer 1

Regexp::Common::URI::http

Answer 2

I don't use regular expressions. I try to create a URI object and see what happens. If it works, I have a URI object that I can query to get the scheme (the other things get turned into "schemeless" URIs).
use URI;
while( <DATA> )
{
chomp;
my $uri = URI->new( $_, 'http' );
if( $uri->scheme ) { print "$uri is a URL\n"; }
else { print "$uri is not a URL\n"; }
}
__END__
foo.html
http://www.example.com/index.html
abc
www.example.com
If I'm looking for a specific sort of URI, I can query the object to see if it satisfies whatever I need, such as a particular domain name. If I'm doing something with URLs, I'm probably going to make an object anyway, so I might as well start with it.

Answer 3

Since you are talking about "a website URL", I guess you are interested in HTTP and HTTPS URLs only.
For that, instead of using regex, you can use the Perl's Data::Validate::URI module.
For example, to validate HTTP and HTTPS URLs:
use Data::Validate::URI;
my $url = "http://google.com";
my $uriValidator = new Data::Validate::URI();
print "Valid web URL!" if $uriValidator->is_web_uri($url)
And, to validate HTTP URL only:
print "Valid HTTP URL!" if $uriValidator->is_http_uri($url)
Finally, to validate any well-formatted URI:
print "Valid URI!" if $uriValidator->is_uri($url)
If instead, for any reason, you actually want a regex, then you can use something like the following to validate HTTP/HTTPS/FTP/SFTP URLs:
print "Valid URL!\n" if $url =~ /^(?:(?:https?|s?ftp))/i;

Answer 4

use Regexp::Common qw /URI/;
while (<>) {
/($RE{URI}{HTTP})/ and print "$1 is an HTTP URI.\n";
}