It’s a common problem with no single right answer: extract the top domain (e.g. example.com) from a given string, which may or may not be a valid URL. I had need of such functionality recently and found answers around the web lacking. So if you ever “just wanted the domain name” out of a string, give this a shot…

 1) {

        preg_match("/^.+\.([a-z0-9\.\-]+\.[a-z]{2,4})$/", $host, $host);

        if (isset($host[1])) {

          return $host[1];

        } else {

          // not a valid domain

          return false;

        }

      } else {

        return $host;

      }

    break;

  }

}
// some examples

var_dump(get_top_domain('http://www.validurl.example.com/directory', 'all'));

var_dump(get_top_domain('http://www.validurl.example.com/directory', 'www'));

var_dump(get_top_domain('domain-string.example.com', 'all'));

var_dump(get_top_domain('domain-string.example.com/nowfails', 'all'));

var_dump(get_top_domain('finds the domain url.example.com', 'all'));

var_dump(get_top_domain('12.34.56.78', 'all'));

?>

```
Most of the examples are simply proofs, but I want to draw attention to the string in example #4, `'domain-string.example.com/nowfails'`. This is not a valid URL, so the call to `parse_url()` fails, forcing the script to use the entire original string. In turn, the path part of the string causes the regex to break, causing a complete failout (`return false;`).
Is there a way to account for this? Surely, however I'm not about to tap that massive keg of exceptions (i.e. just a slash, slash plus path, slash plus another domain in a human-readable string, etc).
No regex for validating URL's or email addresses is ever perfect; the "strict" RFC requirements are too damn broad. So I did what I always do: chose "what works" over "what's technically right." This one requires any 2-4 characters for a the top level domain (TLD), so it doesn't allow for the .museum TLD, and doesn't check to see if the provided TLD is actually valid. If you need to do further verification, that's on you. Here's the current full list of valid TLD's provided by the IANA.
If you need to modify the regex at all, I highly recommend you read this article about email address regex first for two reasons:

* There's a ton of overlap between email and URL regex matching
* It will point out all the gotcha's in your "better" regex theory that you didn't think about