# URLs Validation: Real-time Employee API

## Overview

Learn more about validation of URL formats for Real-time Employee API requests. Validation is used for the values provided in the `url` field.

## Initial validation

Initially, the validity of the URL you provided in your scraping request is verified to ensure it is a valid user profile URL. **Valid URL requirements:**

* Valid profile URLs with proper formatting
* URLs using `http://`, `https://`, or no scheme (`professional-network.com/`...)
* Percent-encoded URLs (e.g., `%C3%A9` for accented characters)
* Minimum 3 and maximum 100 characters in the profile handle

If the URL is not a user profile URL or contains an incorrect number of characters (either too many or too few), you will receive a `422` response code. **Main points of invalid URLs:**

* Profile URLs with restricted special symbols: !@#$+.&'=<>?\[]^\`{}
* URLs with leading/trailing whitespace in the profile name
* Too short (< 3 characters) or too long (> 100 characters) input
* Malformed percent encodings (e.g., `%E2%98%81%EF%B8%8F%`)
* Underscores in profile names

### Blacklist check-up

Following the initial validation, we further check if the profile is not blacklisted in our database. If the profile is blacklisted, your request will result in a `453` error.

### Nonexistent/private profiles

If you submit a nonexistent or private profile URL, the timeout response code `408` will be returned.