Regular Expression to match both relative and absolute URLs

Question

Anyone want to try their hand at coming up with a regex that matches both:

• /foo/bar/baz.gif
• /foo/bar/
• http://www.foo.com/foo/bar

I

Answer 1

That's a tricky one because there are so many valid characters in URL's (before they get url encoded).

Here's my shot:

(http:/|https:/)?(/[^\s"'<>]+)+/?

Also similar to Alex's. The only problem I found with Alex's is that it wouldn't match things like pound signs, dashes, stuff like that. Whereas mine will match all of that.

EDIT -- In fact the only thing that keeps it from being too greedy is the instruction to NOT match whitespace, quotes, apostrophes, or chevrons.