Is FILTER_VALIDATE_URL being too strict?

Question

In PHP, filter_var(\'www.example.com\', FILTER_VALIDATE_URL) returns false. Is this correct? Isn\'t www.example.com a valid URL, or protoc

Answer 1

In addition to Paul Dixon's answer I want to say that you can use flags for FILTER_VALIDATE_URL to specify which part of the URL must be presented.

FILTER_FLAG_SCHEME_REQUIRED
FILTER_FLAG_HOST_REQUIRED
FILTER_FLAG_PATH_REQUIRED
FILTER_FLAG_QUERY_REQUIRED

Since PHP 5.2.1 FILTER_FLAG_SCHEME_REQUIRED and FILTER_FLAG_HOST_REQUIRED flags used by default and, unfortunately, there is no way to disable them (you can't do something like filter_var($url, FILTER_VALIDATE_URL, ~FILTER_FLAG_SCHEME_REQUIRED); if the existence of the URL scheme part does not necessarily). It seems like a bug for me. There is a relative bugreport.