URL Validation

I have some javascript code for a URL validation but it doesnt seem to want to work with the following url... (i think its the " ~ " which is causeing the problem)

code
var w = new RegExp();
w.compile("(ftp|http|https)+://[www]+\\.[A-Za-z0-9-_%&\?\/.=]+$");

example url
http://www.yourdomain.ie/~lgb/test_in_image.png

Also, can anyone recode this so that the following url would also work..

example url
http://sub.yourdomain.ie/test_in_image.png

Can anyone help?

Thanks.

add the ~ to the regualr expression than

Eric

Thanks. I tried that but it didnt seem to work. What about the other url using a sub domain rather than www ?

change [www]+ to (www)?

Eric

I am not sure how you have derived your regex but it is completely wrong.

e.g. [www] means match w or w or w, not www.

The “safe” characters in a URL are alphanumerics (A to Z, a to z and 0 to 9) and the following special characters: the dollar sign (“$”), hyphen (“-”), underscore (“_”), period (“.”), plus sign (“+”), exclamation point (“!”), asterisk (“*”), apostrophe (“'”), left parenthesis (“(”), and right parenthesis (“)”).

The regex you desire (i.e. validate a URL) is:-

^(ftp|http|https):\/\/www[\w%&\$\-\?\/\.!\+\*\(\)\s=~]+$

& and ? cannot normally appear as part of a URL except in query string.

A tilde ~ is not "safe" character but I have included it. A space should be encoded as %20

What is w.compile supposed to do?

In fact it may be simpler and just as effective to just check the starting characters in the URL up to www.

^(ftp|http|https):\/\/www\.

You can test your regular expressions at: http://www.ogauge.co.uk/regextester.html