The Lazy Man's URL Parsing

This is a great trick, but there's an irritating IE bug. On the pathname attribute, IE doesn't add a leading slash on the pathname (whereas all other browsers do).

It can be corrected by doing:

    parser.pathname = parser.pathname.replace(/(^\/?)/,"/");

Further, because you're creating a DOM element, it's less performant than using a RegExp solution. That performance degradation will typically only surface if you're parsing a large number of URLs (for example, in a loop), rather than just 1 or 2.

The interface is officially called "URL decomposition IDL attributes." IIRC it's only implemented by <a/>, <area/> and the Location object.

Here are the canonical docs: http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec-LC/urls.html#interfaces-for-url...

And here's a prettier (but less detailed) version: http://developers.whatwg.org/urls.html#interfaces-for-url-ma...

Just came across this clever solution yesterday, actually. Unfortunately, it doesn't work for URLs containing a username and password (e.g. http://username:password@example.com). Glad to have found URI.js, though--it's exactly what I was looking for.

var link = $('<a/>').attr('href', 'http://example.com)[0] in jQuery, just to show how simple it can be.

A stylistic point is I'd just call it something like "link". Assigning a link element to "parser" is being cute and it's not what the object actually is, even if it's being used with intent to parse.

HN Link: http://www.joezimjs.com/javascript/the-lazy-mans-url-parsing...

Takes you here: This webpage has a redirect loop The webpage at http://www.joezimjs.com/500.shtml/ has resulted in too many redirects. Clearing your cookies for this site or allowing third-party cookies may fix the problem. If not, it is possibly a server configuration issue and not a problem with your computer. Here are some suggestions: Reload this webpage later. Learn more about this problem. Error 310 (net::ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS): There were too many redirects.

Instead of here: http://www.joezimjs.com/javascript/the-lazy-mans-url-parsing...

The orignal seems to be down now. Note that there are many ways to name the bits you parse a URL into: http://tantek.com/2011/238/b1/many-ways-slice-url-name-piece...

Incidentally, the Node.js `require('url').parse(str)` method is designed to present the same API, except that it also includes the auth section as an 'auth' member.

If you are coding with python instead of javascript check out my complete uri module (miniuri.py): https://bitbucket.org/russellballestrini/miniuri/src/tip/min...

Cached copy of the page: http://www.joezimjs.com.nyud.net/javascript/the-lazy-mans-ur...

Laziness is the mother of all inventions. Neat trick.

I wonder if it works in Internet Explorer 6 or 7.