How to check if a string is a valid URL in Golang?

Go Programming Server Side Programming Programming

There are cases where we would want to know if the URL that we got from an http request in the form of a string is even valid or not. In such cases, one can use two functions that the net/url package of Go's standard library provides.

Example 1

The first basic case is to check if the URL is well structured and a valid one, and for that, we can use the ParseRequestURI() function of the URL package.

Consider the code shown below.

package main

import (
   "fmt"
   "net/url"
)

func main() {
   u, err := url.ParseRequestURI("http://golangcode.com")
   if err != nil {
      panic(err)
   }
   fmt.Println(u)
}

Output

If we run the command go run main.go on the above code, then we will get the following output in the terminal.

http://golangcode.com

In the above code, we passed a valid URL with a host and the scheme and if we change it to an invalid one, we will get an error.

Example 2

Consider the code shown below.

package main

import (
   "fmt"
   "net/url"
)

func main() {
   u, err := url.ParseRequestURI("golangcode.com")
   if err != nil {
      panic(err)
   }
   fmt.Println(u)
}

Output

If we run the command go run main.go on the above code, then we will get the following output in the terminal.

panic: parse "golangcode.com": invalid URI for request

There's a catch when using ParseRequestURI() and that is, it considers that the URL was received in an HTTP Request, which can lead to some inconsistencies.

If we pass "Test:Test" string as the argument to the ParseRequestURI() function, then it will not yield any error. So, a better option is to make use of the Parse function along with the ParseRequestURI().

Example 3

Consider the code shown below.

package main

import (
   "fmt"
   "net/url"
)

func main() {
   _, err := url.ParseRequestURI("http://www.google.com")
   if err != nil {
      panic(err)
   }
   u, err := url.Parse("http://www.google.com")
   if err != nil || u.Scheme == "" || u.Host == "" {
      panic(err)
   }

   fmt.Println("All ok")
}

Output

If we run the command go run main.go on the above code, then we will get the following output in the terminal.

All Ok

Kiran Kumar Panigrahi

Published on 01-Nov-2021 07:41:23

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