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 have access to Bash >= 3.0 you can do this in pure bash as well, thanks to the re-match operator =~:

pattern='^(([[:alnum:]]+)://)?(([[:alnum:]]+)@)?([^:^@]+)(:([[:digit:]]+))?$'
if [[ "http://us@cos.com:3142" =~ $pattern ]]; then
        proto=${BASH_REMATCH[2]}
        user=${BASH_REMATCH[4]}
        host=${BASH_REMATCH[5]}
        port=${BASH_REMATCH[7]}
fi

It should be faster and less resource-hungry then all the previous examples, because no external process is be spawned.