How to check if string is a URL?

[Sebastian_Schaeffer]

Hi,

I am struggling to build a function that checks if a string in a cell is a URL or just a string. The string would most likely not include protocols like https:// so I would prefer to check for all available top level domains like .com, .net etc.

Is there a good way to implement this?

Thanks
Seb

[daniel]

Hey Sebastian

Good question. Is there any type of consistency to URLs? For example, do they all follow a similar structure or do you know what top-level domains might exist?

Perhaps a basic if/else could work. You could set it up to create a column called URL? and add the value Yes if your original column contains .com, .net, .org, .io, etc.

You can also import a separate list of top-level domains and treat them as a set of keywords. Merge them with your original data and use those keyword values to check if that original column contains those values. This post can help you set that up:

Find keywords in text (from a large list)

Hey @Frederic! Welcome to the community. Here’s a walkthrough on how you can achieve this using Parabola. This assumes you have a separate list of keywords and tags that you can import. [keyword-flow] Start by importing your keywords/tags and recipes. Here’s what my recipes data looks like: [recipes] And here’s what my keywords data looks like: [keywords-tags] Using two Insert Text Column steps we can create new columns for each table called Join and insert a value of 1. This new colum…

Feel free to take a screenshot of some of your data and, we can look into other options. Alternatively, you can share your flow with us at help@parabola.io and we’d be happy to further investigate!