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.