PHP Regex that matches URLs without invalid characters

Question

I'm looking for a Regex that will find URLs in a string but ignore pre/following characters which are not part of the URL.

for example, from the string:

example.co.uk (main site: example.com),

The Regex will find:

example.co.uk and exaple.com.

In order to find URLs within a given string, I use the Regex '#(www\.|https?://)?[a-z0-9]+\.[a-z0-9]{2,4}\S*#i'. The problem is that if I use this regex with the given string above, it finds example.co.uk and example.com) with the closing bracket at the end.

Is there any Regex that can find URLs in a string, not matter what characters it has from both sides?

Thanks!

Possible duplicate of http://stackoverflow.com/questions/206059/php-validation-regex-for-url?rq=1 — Abdul Hameed, Mar 13 '17 at 11:25
@AbdulHameed no, It's not a duplicate. His regex requires `http://`, and all the other comments does match the URLs with the closing bracket. — Itay Ganor, Mar 13 '17 at 11:35

m87 · Accepted Answer · 2017-03-13T11:40:21.560

0

You may have to use a word boundary (\b) ...

(?:www\.|https?:\/\/)?[a-z0-9]+\.[a-z0-9]{2,4}\S*\b
                                                  ^

regex demo

edited Mar 13 '17 at 11:40

answered Mar 13 '17 at 11:34

m87

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Thank you so much! – Itay Ganor Mar 13 '17 at 11:45

PHP Regex that matches URLs without invalid characters

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