Feature request: URI Validation method that returns boolean

[benSlaughter]

Having come across an issue using ruby-json-schema, a discussion has been started here regarding parsing a URI using addressable, and managing failures and flow control with exceptions.
It was mentioned that having a method similar to parse that would validate a URI and return a boolean value if the URI was valid instead of raising an exception.

tl;dr Can we have a URI validation method please that returns a boolean value.

[dentarg]

having a method similar to parse that would validate a URI and return a boolean value if the URI was valid instead of raising an exception

This is actually what the gem twingly-url is doing, see https://github.com/twingly/twingly-url#getting-started for some examples. It might be useful for you, or give you some inspiration on how to wrap addressable yourself. twingly-url is using addressable and public_suffix under the covers. (Full disclosure: I work for the company that made twingly-url)

[benSlaughter]

Nothing wrong with plugging your own gems ;)

Thanks for the response, I'm not the owner of the code with the issue, I was enquiring as I liked the idea of a non aggressive validation method.
I'll pass this on 👍

[RST-J]

Of course we can handle addressable's execption and wrap it internally in json-schema to get along. But as using exceptions for control flow is considered bad in general in programming (at least this is my perception), I thought it would be worth to raise this issue here at the root. And really no harm done if @sporkmonger looks at it and decides to leave things as they are. Its only about giving it a thought.

[sporkmonger]

As a matter of implementation, I agree that this should be a peer method to parse. As a matter of practicality, I think this would produce a massive maintenance load that I'm not prepared to take on. There's no particularly good definition of "validity" for URLs because most arbitrary strings are perfectly valid as URLs. There's a handful of strings that resolve to something invalid (e.g. URL with non-numeric port), but these are usually the result of a semantic failure rather than a syntactic failure. Addressable is focused primarily on the syntactic level, which is why it doesn't really try terribly hard to ascertain whether a URL makes sense or not. If someone wants to submit a PR and then commit to maintaining that code, I'm open to it, but I'd need a firm commitment to maintain or I would decline the PR.

[dentarg]

I'm going to close this one, and recommend use of https://github.com/twingly/twingly-url (or your own wrapper) if you want this. While it has a strange name (hehe) it does this and I think it does it well. I no longer work at Twingly but I still use it when I need to check if a URL is valid or not.