Javascript url validation allowing relative and absolute urls

Question

I'm trying to validate a field to allow relative and absolute urls. I'm using the regex from this post but it is allowing spaces in the url.

var urlRegex = new RegExp(/(\/?[\w-]+)(\/[\w-]+)*\/?|(((http|ftp|https):\/\/)?[\w-]+(\.[\w-]+)+([\w.,@?^=%&:\/~+#-]*[\w@?^=%&\/~+#-])?)/gi);

Example:

// this should work
this/will/work.aspx?say=hello 
http://www.example.com/this/will/work.aspx?say=hello

// this shouldn't work but does
and/this will also work/even though it shouldn't
and/this-shouldn't/but it does/also

The code below is what I was originally using to validate just absolute urls and it was working perfectly. If I remember properly, I pulled it from the jquery source. If this could be modified to also accept relative urls that would be perfect, but this is out of my league.

var urlRegex = new RegExp(/^(https?|ftp):\/\/(((([a-z]|\d|-|\.|_|~|[\u00A0-\uD7FF\uF900-\uFDCF\uFDF0-\uFFEF])|(%[\da-f]{2})|[!\$&'\(\)\*\+,;=]|:)*@)?(((\d|[1-9]\d|1\d\d|2[0-4]\d|25[0-5])\.(\d|[1-9]\d|1\d\d|2[0-4]\d|25[0-5])\.(\d|[1-9]\d|1\d\d|2[0-4]\d|25[0-5])\.(\d|[1-9]\d|1\d\d|2[0-4]\d|25[0-5]))|((([a-z]|\d|[\u00A0-\uD7FF\uF900-\uFDCF\uFDF0-\uFFEF])|(([a-z]|\d|[\u00A0-\uD7FF\uF900-\uFDCF\uFDF0-\uFFEF])([a-z]|\d|-|\.|_|~|[\u00A0-\uD7FF\uF900-\uFDCF\uFDF0-\uFFEF])*([a-z]|\d|[\u00A0-\uD7FF\uF900-\uFDCF\uFDF0-\uFFEF])))\.)+(([a-z]|[\u00A0-\uD7FF\uF900-\uFDCF\uFDF0-\uFFEF])|(([a-z]|[\u00A0-\uD7FF\uF900-\uFDCF\uFDF0-\uFFEF])([a-z]|\d|-|\.|_|~|[\u00A0-\uD7FF\uF900-\uFDCF\uFDF0-\uFFEF])*([a-z]|[\u00A0-\uD7FF\uF900-\uFDCF\uFDF0-\uFFEF])))\.?)(:\d*)?)(\/((([a-z]|\d|-|\.|_|~|[\u00A0-\uD7FF\uF900-\uFDCF\uFDF0-\uFFEF])|(%[\da-f]{2})|[!\$&'\(\)\*\+,;=]|:|@)+(\/(([a-z]|\d|-|\.|_|~|[\u00A0-\uD7FF\uF900-\uFDCF\uFDF0-\uFFEF])|(%[\da-f]{2})|[!\$&'\(\)\*\+,;=]|:|@)*)*)?)?(\?((([a-z]|\d|-|\.|_|~|[\u00A0-\uD7FF\uF900-\uFDCF\uFDF0-\uFFEF])|(%[\da-f]{2})|[!\$&'\(\)\*\+,;=]|:|@)|[\uE000-\uF8FF]|\/|\?)*)?(\#((([a-z]|\d|-|\.|_|~|[\u00A0-\uD7FF\uF900-\uFDCF\uFDF0-\uFFEF])|(%[\da-f]{2})|[!\$&'\(\)\*\+,;=]|:|@)|\/|\?)*)?$/i);

Answer 1

I wrote an article about URI validation complete with code snippets for all the various URI components as defined by RFC3986 here:

Regular Expression URI Validation

You may find what you are looking for there. Note however that almost any string represents a valid URI - even an empty string!

Answer 2

I think you just need to anchor the pattern so that it has to match the whole string:

var urlRegex = /^(\/?[\w-]+)(\/[\w-]+)*\/?|(((http|ftp|https):\/\/)?[\w-]+(\.[\w-]+)+([\w.,@?^=%&:\/~+#-]*[\w@?^=%&\/~+#-])?)$/gi;

The leading ^ and trailing $ means that the pattern has to match the entire string instead of just some part of it.

edit that said, the pattern has other problems. First, those HTML entities for & (&) need to be just "&". The slashes don't need to be escaped in [] groups, and we don't need the "g" suffix. That leaves us with:

var urlRegex = /^(?:(\/?[\w-]+)(\/[\w-]+)*\/?|(((http|ftp|https):\/\/)?[\w-]+(\.[\w-]+)*([\w.,@?^=%&:/~+#-]*[\w@?^=%&/~+#-])?))$/i;

edit again - oops also need to wrap the whole thing.