People talk about URLs, URIs, and URNs as if they\'re different things, but they look the same to the naked eye.
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These are some very well-written but long-winded answers. Here is the difference as far as CodeIgniter is concerned:
URL - http://example.com/some/page.html
URI - /some/page.html
Put simply, URL is the full way to indentify any resource anywhere and can have different protocols like FTP, HTTP, SCP, etc.
URI is a resource on the current domain, so it needs less information to be found.
In every instance that CodeIgniter uses the word URL or URI this is the difference they are talking about, though in the grand-scheme of the web, it is not 100% correct.