Regular Expression Validation PHP - php

Question

I've been trying to get this to work for some time now but can't. Here is my problem:
I have the following reg. expression: (http|https|ftp|ftps)\:\/\/[a-zA-Z0-9\-\.]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,3}(\/\S*)?. I'm trying to validate a URL.
The problem is when I have for example:
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QK8mJJJvaes<br />Hello" (this is how it saves in the database using nl2br)
It validates up to this:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QK8mJJJvaes<br. I've read that the problem might be because of the \S* in the reg. expression. But if I take that out it only validates https://www.youtube.com/.
I've also thought of adding a space before the <br />, but I don't know if their is a better solution.
Any help is greatly appreciated :).
Full Code:
$reg_exUrl = "/(http|https|ftp|ftps)\:\/\/[a-zA-Z0-9\-\.]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,3}(\/\S*)?/";
// The Text you want to filter for urls
$finalMsg = 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QK8mJJJvaes<br />Hello';
// Check if there is a url in the text
if(preg_match_all($reg_exUrl, $finalMsg, $url)){
// make the urls hyper links
$matches = array_unique($url[0]);
foreach($matches as $match) {
$replacement = "<a href=".$match." target='_blank'>{$match}</a>";
$finalMsg = str_replace($match,$replacement,$finalMsg);
}
}

Answer 1

Change it to this:
/(http|https|ftp|ftps)\:\/\/[a-zA-Z0-9\-\.]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,3}(\/\S[^<]*)?/
This will at least validate your given URL, and any other that ends with a tag...
Test it here: https://regex101.com/
EDIT: Isn't matching root paths. The solution from #Jonathan Kuhn in the comments is the best one:
/(http|https|ftp|ftps)\:\/\/[a-zA-Z0-9\-\.]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,3}(\/[^\s<]*)?/
UPDATE:
Just revisiting some old answers and I'm irritated why I commented like I did.. I don't see the problem though, your code works. :D
Although this short piece of code would do the same:
$url = "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QK8mJJJvaes<br />Hello";
$regex = '/(http|https|ftp|ftps)\:\/\/[a-zA-Z0-9\-\.]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,3}(\/[^\s<]*)?/';
// make the URLs hyperlinks
$url = preg_replace($regex, '$0', $url);
echo $url;