How to fully validate a URL in PHP

Validating your URLs can help shield you from a great deal of inconvenience down the road. For example it can eliminate broken links entirely. Most methods for URL validation only check syntax, which is not always definitive. I am going to show you how to implement full validation, which also queries the server, checks endpoints, and even runs a virus scan. And all of this is going to be accomplished in just a few minutes with the help of an API.

We begin with installing our client with this command for Composer.

composer require cloudmersive/cloudmersive_validate_api_client

After installation, we can call our URL validation function, shown here:

<?php
require_once(__DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php');
// Configure API key authorization: Apikey
$config = Swagger\Client\Configuration::getDefaultConfiguration()->setApiKey('Apikey', 'YOUR_API_KEY');
// Uncomment below to setup prefix (e.g. Bearer) for API key, if needed
// $config = Swagger\Client\Configuration::getDefaultConfiguration()->setApiKeyPrefix('Apikey', 'Bearer');
$apiInstance = new Swagger\Client\Api\DomainApi(
// If you want use custom http client, pass your client which implements `GuzzleHttp\ClientInterface`.
// This is optional, `GuzzleHttp\Client` will be used as default.
new GuzzleHttp\Client(),
$config
);
$request = new \Swagger\Client\Model\ValidateUrlRequestFull(); // \Swagger\Client\Model\ValidateUrlRequestFull | Input URL request
try {
$result = $apiInstance->domainUrlFull($request);
print_r($result);
} catch (Exception $e) {
echo 'Exception when calling DomainApi->domainUrlFull: ', $e->getMessage(), PHP_EOL;
}
?>

OK, we are already done. You now have your URL validation up and running.