Python: Check if String is URL

In this article, we will discover two methods to check if a string is a URL.

Checking if a string is a URL using the validators library

First, we need to install validators using pip.

pip install validators

How to use it:

validators.url(string)

The validators.url method returns True if a string is a URL, else returns False.

Example of checking a string:

import validators

string = "https://pytutorial.com"

print(validators.url(string))

Output:

True

Example #2

import validators

string = "https://pytutorial.com"

if validators.url(string) is True:
    print("it's URL")
    

Output:

it's URL

Checking if a string is a URL using Regular Expression (Regex)

import re

regex = re.compile(
        r'^(?:http|ftp)s?://' # http:// or https://
        r'(?:(?:[A-Z0-9](?:[A-Z0-9-]{0,61}[A-Z0-9])?\.)+(?:[A-Z]{2,6}\.?|[A-Z0-9-]{2,}\.?)|' #domain...
        r'localhost|' #localhost...
        r'\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3})' # ...or ip
        r'(?::\d+)?' # optional port
        r'(?:/?|[/?]\S+)$', re.IGNORECASE)


string = "https://pytutorial.com"

print(re.match(regex, string) is not None )     

Output

True