URL draft specification validate method

Question

I've been looking at the new URL specification which is now implemented in Chrome Canary, and it looks very useful.

Is there any way to validate a URI before it is passed into the URL object?

For example

var urlToCheck = "http//www.google.com";
if(URL.isValid(urlToCheck)) {
    var u = new URL(urlToCheck, baseUrl);
    console.log(u.hostname);
}

I can't see anything in the linked specification doc. I would really not like to have to process the thrown Exception just to check the URI is valid.

Answer 1

Actually the 2-parameter version of the URL constructor accepts anything as its first parameter:

try{
    new URL(null, 'http://www.example.com');
    new URL({ob:'jects',even:{nested:'ones'}}, 'http://www.example.com');
    new URL(['arrays'], 'http://www.example.com');
    new URL(/regexes/, 'http://www.example.com');
    new URL(false, 'http://www.example.com');
    new URL(undefined, 'http://www.example.com');

    console.log('new URL() takes any value as its first parameter!');
}catch(e){}

This means you don't have to validate both URLs; you only have to validate the base URL. Therefore a simple solution like this should suffice:

URL.isValid = function(url) {
    try{
        new URL(url);
    } catch(e) {
        return false;
    }
    return true;
};