What is the fastest way to get the domain/host name from a URL?

Question

I need to go through a large list of string url\'s and extract the domain name from them.

For example:

http://www.stackoverflow.com/questions

Answer 1

You could write a regexp? http:// is always the same, and then match everything until you get the first '/'.

Answer 2

Assuming that they're all well-formed URLs, but you dont' know whether they'll be http://, https://, etc.

int start = theUrlString.indexOf('/');
int start = theUrlString.indexOf('/', start+1);
int end = theUrlString.indexOf('/', start+1);
String domain = theUrlString.subString(start, end);