URL Authentication – A New Approach

It is time for web developers and software engineers to make a new approach when checking the validity of URLs and emails that are provided by users. Icann has decided that it is going to allow new suffix’ and the ability to host a website on a domain that has no suffix ie: ‘http://codewithdesign/index.php’. With this change in URLs means that all regular expressions are going to have to not force a suffix or that last decimal as a root URL.

How Will The New Domains Affect Me?

The new domain scheme is going to change how your website validates proper emails and URLs which can be a rather large change on websites that do not have formatting called from one place. Because of this change you will have to overhaul your website/blog/app to support new URLs and emails.

How Should I Go About Making The Change

If you haven’t done so already it is a good idea to make sure that your formatting and checking is coming from one place and will be able to handle the errors accordingly. The first thing that is required is either a functions file or a class file that will support multiple formats of input. This way when something like this changes you only need to update the code once.

Ways To Check URLs And Emails

When working with a URL you can change your regular expression to just check for proper characters and the presence of ‘http://’ or ‘https://’, but there is a much more fun way to check for the new format as well. You should still be using a filter or a regular expression but make sure that your version of PHP is high enough if you are going to use a filter.

Check For An Existing Email

Because of the new URL scheme we are going to need to handle the case that the user is from a website such as ‘http://bearattacksarenotgood/’ This will require us to check for an existing email without the checking of a proper suffix in the email since a user can have the email ‘calebjonasson@bearattacksarenotgood’.

We can easily check for an existing email by using a function called ‘checkdnsrr’ but first we need to split the email name from the URL which will give us ‘calebjonasson’ and ‘bearattacksarenotgood’ which we can accomplish by using the list function will will break apart a string by finding a character.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16

<?php
//load a variable with an email.
$emailAddress = 'calebjonasson@bearattacksarenotgood';
//split the email by the user name and domain name
list($userName, $domainName) = split('@', $emailAddress);
//use checkdnsrr to validate the domain names existence.
if(checkdnsrr($domainName, 'MX'))
{
    //return value on success.
    return true;
}else{
    //return value on failure.
    return false;
}
 
?>

Pinging A Server

It is possible to ping a server through PHP and it is also possible to just use a cURL to request the page information and check and the response headers. The first thing I will show you is how to send a request which will allow you to check for ping of the data server in question.

My prefered method of doing so is to install net ping onto the server. This is the best solution that I have found on the web to this day and is very simple to use. Here is a tutorial from Code Diesel.