In a text there's (possibly) one URL inside <a> tags. Need to validate that URL.

[nonhocapito]

The user submits some text that, to his/her discretion can contain a url in the form of <a href="someurl">some text</a>.

 

I need to know if "someurl" is a valid url.

 

Consider that:

the "<a>" tag and the url might not even be there;

a crazy user might even have created more than one url;

 

I cannot run a regex to extract URLs from text (I found some on the web) because that regex naturally looks for valid URLs: but the url I am looking for (if any) is invalid!

 

The only clue I think is the presence of the "<a>" tags. Found those, the regex should look for the "href" attribute tags and then validate.

I'm no good at regex and can't say how all this should happen.

 

Any ideas?