Getting parts of a URL (Regex)

Question

Given the URL (single line):
http://test.example.com/dir/subdir/file.html

How can I extract the following parts using regular expressions:

1. The Subd

Answer 1

I'm a few years late to the party, but I'm surprised no one has mentioned the Uniform Resource Identifier specification has a section on parsing URIs with a regular expression. The regular expression, written by Berners-Lee, et al., is:

^(([^:/?#]+):)?(//([^/?#]*))?([^?#]*)(\?([^#]*))?(#(.*))?
 12            3  4          5       6  7        8 9

The numbers in the second line above are only to assist readability; they indicate the reference points for each subexpression (i.e., each paired parenthesis). We refer to the value matched for subexpression as $. For example, matching the above expression to

http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/uri/#Related

results in the following subexpression matches:

$1 = http:
$2 = http
$3 = //www.ics.uci.edu
$4 = www.ics.uci.edu
$5 = /pub/ietf/uri/
$6 = 
$7 = 
$8 = #Related
$9 = Related

For what it's worth, I found that I had to escape the forward slashes in JavaScript:

^(([^:\/?#]+):)?(\/\/([^\/?#]*))?([^?#]*)(\?([^#]*))?(#(.*))?