Question

I just really started learning how to use regex’s and i am trying to create one to match urls. So far i have:

(http://|https://|www|\w)+\.[\w]{2,4}[^\s]+

can anyone give me some feedback or advice on how this looks, or maybe point me in a better

Answer 1

the regex you wrote is a good start, the true power of regex is that it can be very… well… powerful 🙂
there are a lot of differences in the structure of URL that are still considered ok.

consult a Regex Reference to learn more and understand the meaning of all the characters.

and you can check for what the community generates by going to a site like this one

this may be overly complex for what you need but this is a well written regex for URLmatching: ^(((ht|f)tp(s?))\://)?(www.|[a-zA-Z].)[a-zA-Z0-9\-\.]+\.(com|edu|gov|mil|net|org|biz|info|name|museum|us|ca|uk)(\:[0-9]+)*(/($|[a-zA-Z0-9\.\,\;\?\'\\\+&%\$#\=~_\-]+))*$

on a side note i use this online Regex Helper to test my regex strings without the need to actually run them from the code.