extract url from text with www - PHP

Question

I need to examine a text to extract the urls in case it contains them. As far as I have been able to find out there is this function that does it.

preg_match_all('#\bhttps?://[^,\s()<>]+(?:\([\w\d]+\)|([^,[:punct:]\s]|/))#', $string, $match);

The problem is that this function only extracts urls if they start with http.

How can I make it extract urls that start with www.xxx as well?

Answer 1

You can use this regex expression to identify URLS that use www. https and http.

$url = "www.example.com";

if (preg_match_all("^(http:\/\/www\.|https:\/\/www\.|http:\/\/|https:\/\/)?[a-z0-9]+([\-\.]{1}[a-z0-9]+)*\.[a-z]{2,5}(:[0-9]{1,5})?(\/.*)?$^", $url)) {
    echo "URL is valid";
} else {
    echo "URL is invalid";
}