How do I parse a URL into hostname and path in javascript?

Question

I would like to take a string

var a = \"http://example.com/aa/bb/\"

and process it into an object such that

a.hostname == \         


        

Answer 1

freddiefujiwara's answer is pretty good but I also needed to support relative URLs within Internet Explorer. I came up with the following solution:

function getLocation(href) {
    var location = document.createElement("a");
    location.href = href;
    // IE doesn't populate all link properties when setting .href with a relative URL,
    // however .href will return an absolute URL which then can be used on itself
    // to populate these additional fields.
    if (location.host == "") {
      location.href = location.href;
    }
    return location;
};

Now use it to get the needed properties:

var a = getLocation('http://example.com/aa/bb/');
document.write(a.hostname);
document.write(a.pathname);

Example:

function getLocation(href) {
  var location = document.createElement("a");
  location.href = href;
  // IE doesn't populate all link properties when setting .href with a relative URL,
  // however .href will return an absolute URL which then can be used on itself
  // to populate these additional fields.
  if (location.host == "") {
    location.href = location.href;
  }
  return location;
};
var urlToParse = 'http://example.com/aa/bb/',
  a = getLocation(urlToParse);
document.write('Absolute URL: ' + urlToParse);
document.write('
');
document.write('Hostname: ' + a.hostname);
document.write('
');
document.write('Pathname: ' + a.pathname);