How to check for a valid URL in Java?

What is the best way to check if a URL is valid in Java?

If tried to call new URL(urlString) and catch a MalformedURLException, but it seems to be happy with anything that begins with http://.

I'm not concerned about establishing a connection, just validity. Is there a method for this? An annotation in Hibernate Validator? Should I use a regex?

Edit: Some examples of accepted URLs are http://*** and http://my favorite site!.

Consider using the Apache Commons UrlValidator class

UrlValidator urlValidator = new UrlValidator();
urlValidator.isValid("http://my favorite site!");

There are several properties that you can set to control how this class behaves, by default http, https, and ftp are accepted.

Here is way I tried and found useful,

URL u = new URL(name); // this would check for the protocol
u.toURI(); // does the extra checking required for validation of URI 

I'd love to post this as a comment to Tendayi Mawushe's answer, but I'm afraid there is not enough space ;)

This is the relevant part from the Apache Commons UrlValidator source:

/**
 * This expression derived/taken from the BNF for URI (RFC2396).
 */
private static final String URL_PATTERN =
        "/^(([^:/?#]+):)?(//([^/?#]*))?([^?#]*)(\\?([^#]*))?(#(.*))?/";
//         12            3  4          5       6   7        8 9

/**
 * Schema/Protocol (ie. http:, ftp:, file:, etc).
 */
private static final int PARSE_URL_SCHEME = 2;

/**
 * Includes hostname/ip and port number.
 */
private static final int PARSE_URL_AUTHORITY = 4;

private static final int PARSE_URL_PATH = 5;

private static final int PARSE_URL_QUERY = 7;

private static final int PARSE_URL_FRAGMENT = 9;

You can easily build your own validator from there.

My favorite approach, without external libraries:

try {
    URI uri = new URI(name);

    // perform checks for scheme, authority, host, etc., based on your requirements

    if ("mailto".equals(uri.getScheme()) {/*Code*/}
    if (uri.getHost() == null) {/*Code*/}

} catch (URISyntaxException e) {
}

I didn't like any of the implementations (because they use a Regex which is an expensive operation, or a library which is an overkill if you only need one method), so I ended up using the java.net.URI class with some extra checks, and limiting the protocols to: http, https, file, ftp, mailto, news, urn.

And yes, catching exceptions can be an expensive operation, but probably not as bad as Regular Expressions:

final static Set<String> protocols, protocolsWithHost;

static {
  protocolsWithHost = new HashSet<String>( 
      Arrays.asList( new String[]{ "file", "ftp", "http", "https" } ) 
  );
  protocols = new HashSet<String>( 
      Arrays.asList( new String[]{ "mailto", "news", "urn" } ) 
  );
  protocols.addAll(protocolsWithHost);
}

public static boolean isURI(String str) {
  int colon = str.indexOf(':');
  if (colon < 3)                      return false;

  String proto = str.substring(0, colon).toLowerCase();
  if (!protocols.contains(proto))     return false;

  try {
    URI uri = new URI(str);
    if (protocolsWithHost.contains(proto)) {
      if (uri.getHost() == null)      return false;

      String path = uri.getPath();
      if (path != null) {
        for (int i=path.length()-1; i >= 0; i--) {
          if ("?<>:*|\"".indexOf( path.charAt(i) ) > -1)
            return false;
        }
      }
    }

    return true;
  } catch ( Exception ex ) {}

  return false;
}

The most "foolproof" way is to check for the availability of URL:

public boolean isURL(String url) {
  try {
     (new java.net.URL(url)).openStream().close();
     return true;
  } catch (Exception ex) { }
  return false;
}

Judging by the source code for URI, the

public URL(URL context, String spec, URLStreamHandler handler)

constructor does more validation than the other constructors. You might try that one, but YMMV.

###validator package: There seems to be a nice package by Yonatan Matalon called UrlUtil. Quoting its API:

isValidWebPageAddress(java.lang.String address, boolean validateSyntax, 
                      boolean validateExistance) 
Checks if the given address is a valid web page address.

###Sun's approach - check the network address Sun's Java site offers connect attempt as a solution for validating URLs.

###Other regex code snippets: There are regex validation attempts at Oracle's site and weberdev.com.