Idiomatic way of detecting valid URI?

[snunez1]

Is there a way of detecting a valid URI given a string representation?

The use case is this:
I have a function that takes multiple input sources and dispatches on the type; stream, string, pathname at the moment. For URLs we have to turn them into a stream at the function invocation level with (dex:get ... :want-stream t) and this is getting tedious as the number of internet based input sources increases.

The challenge is in passing the URI as a string: how do we know that the string is for input itself or designates a URI to retrieve? For this purpose, it is sufficient to detect a valid URI, say RFC 3986, and if it is get a stream via dex, and if it's not a valid URI use the string as input. Something like valid-uri-p or similar would be perfect, but I didn't see anything like this in the code.

Is there any way of doing this with quri?

[Ambrevar]

Good question, I don't think quri provides such a validation function. Correct me if I'm wrong. Nyxt did implement its own though: https://github.com/atlas-engineer/nyxt/blob/2.2.0/source/urls.lisp#L76 I don't think it's exactly RFC 3986, so we might have to update it a little. Then shall we merge it into quri?

[snunez1]

That would work well, thanks.

[snunez1]

Just came back to see if this was closed. Although the Nyxt implementation and RFC 3986 are unquestionably better solutions, perhaps a quick & dirty checking for http(s) would suffice? That's what I've been using and so far it does the job.

[Ambrevar]

Sorry, I haven't had time to dedicate to quri. Pull requests are welcome!