esc_url

Always use esc_url when sanitizing URLs (in text nodes, attribute nodes or anywhere else). Rejects URLs that do not have one of the provided whitelisted protocols (defaulting to http, https, ftp, ftps, mailto, news, irc, gopher, nntp, feed, and telnet), eliminates invalid characters, and removes dangerous characters. This function encodes characters as HTML entities: use it when generating an (X)HTML or XML document. Encodes ampersands (&) and single quotes (‘) as numeric entity references (&#038, &#039).

If the URL appears to be an absolute link that does not contain a scheme, prepends http://. Please note that relative urls (/my-url/parameter2/), as well as anchors (#myanchor) and parameter items (?myparam=yes) are also allowed and filtered as a special case, without prepending the default protocol to the filtered url.

Replaces the deprecated clean_url().