Parse URL in shell script

Question

I have url like:

sftp://user@host.net/some/random/path

I want to extract user, host and path from this string. Any part can be random lengt

Answer 1

If you really want to do it in shell, you can do something as simple as the following by using awk. This requires knowing how many fields you will actually be passed (e.g. no password sometimes and not others).

#!/bin/bash

FIELDS=($(echo "sftp://user@host.net/some/random/path" \
  | awk '{split($0, arr, /[\/\@:]*/); for (x in arr) { print arr[x] }}'))
proto=${FIELDS[1]}
user=${FIELDS[2]}
host=${FIELDS[3]}
path=$(echo ${FIELDS[@]:3} | sed 's/ /\//g')

If you don't have awk and you do have grep, and you can require that each field have at least two characters and be reasonably predictable in format, then you can do:

#!/bin/bash

FIELDS=($(echo "sftp://user@host.net/some/random/path" \
   | grep -o "[a-z0-9.-][a-z0-9.-]*" | tr '\n' ' '))
proto=${FIELDS[1]}
user=${FIELDS[2]}
host=${FIELDS[3]}
path=$(echo ${FIELDS[@]:3} | sed 's/ /\//g')