modifying regex to detect urls

Question

I have the following regex, which detects a url based on it having http:// when entered:

(http|https|ftp|ftps)\:\/\/[a-zA-Z0-9\-\.]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,3}(\/\S*)

So with the above if i enter http://www.google.com this works great. However, if i was to miss the http:// out and even the www. it wont detect the above as a url.

Is there an easy way to adapt the above to accept urls without http:// or www. even though i dont really know how regex works fully? I ahve been playing with the following site:

http://regexpal.com/

pierroz · Accepted Answer · 2013-10-18 16:25:06Z

1

You can make http:// and www. optional. It can be achieved with the question mark '?' which means 0 or 1 occurrence of the pattern.

((http|https|ftp|ftps)\:\/\/)?(www\.)?[a-zA-Z0-9\-\.]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,3}(\/\S*)

answered Oct 18, 2013 at 16:25

pierroz

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PhilTrep · Accepted Answer · 2013-10-18 16:28:18Z

0

For a more complete regex match:

/^([a-z][a-z0-9\*\-\.]*):\/\/(?:(?:(?:[\w\.\-\+!$&'*\+,;=]|%[0-9a-f]{2})+:)*(?:[\w\.\-\+%!$&'*\+,;=]|%[0-9a-f]{2})+@)?(?:(?:[a-z0-9\-\.]|%[0-9a-f]{2})+|(?:\[(?:[0-9a-f]{0,4}:)*(?:[0-9a-f]{0,4})\]))(?::[0-9]+)?(?:[\/|\?](?:[\w#!:\.\?\+=&@!$'~*,;\/\[\]\-]|%[0-9a-f]{2})*)?$/xiS

answered Oct 18, 2013 at 16:28

PhilTrep

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