I know it's quite an old question but since it does not have any accepted answer, I suggest you to use the URI.js framework: https://github.com/medialize/URI.js
You can use it to check for malformed URI using a try/catch block:
function isValidURL(url)
{
try {
(new URI(url));
return true;
}
catch (e) {
// Malformed URI
return false;
}
}
Of course it will consider something like "%@" as a well formed relative URI... So I suggest you read the URI.js API to perform more checks, for example if you want to make sure that the user entered a well formed absolute URL you may do like this:
function isValidURL(url)
{
try {
var uri = new URI(url);
// URI has a scheme and a host
return (!!uri.scheme() && !!uri.host());
}
catch (e) {
// Malformed URI
return false;
}
}