Check wildcard URL

[rhyspaterson]

Hey guys,

 

I'm looking for a function that will help me determine whether or not a URL entered by a user matches specific requirements. This is done using $_POST.

 

Basically the format of the URL must be either: www.example.com, *.example.com, www.example.*, or *.example.* - or some kind of combination such as www.url.com*. I don't want to allow a star in the 'url'.

 

So in theory, to check this, all i would have to do is make sure the string contains:

 

[www and/or *].[text].[text and/or *]

 

I think my theory is correct..? Could anyone please help me out with this function?

 

Thanks heaps lads

[stoker]

Using regex should work?

 

$url = $_POST['url']; // do stripslashes and other cleaning here probably

if (preg_match('/(www\.example\.com|www\.example\..+|.+\.example\..+)/i',$url))
{
  // It matched
}

 

in regex . means match anything, the + is a quantifier of 1 or more, stuff inside parenthesis separated by pipe is basically "or"  (a|b|c).. special chars like . and / needs to be escaped with \, so a \. means literal .

 

regex can be complex stuff but for this task it should be pretty simple..

 

[rhyspaterson]

Thanks muchly stoker, will look into it

[sasa]

try

<?php
$a = 'wwW*.sasa.l*';
if(preg_match('/^(www|\*)[\*]?\.[a-z0-9]+\.([a-z0-9]+|\*)[\*]?$/i',$a,$b)) echo 'OK'; else echo 'NO';
?>