parseUri 1.2: Split URLs in JavaScript

Edit (2024): parseUri has had a major update and is now available on GitHub and npm

I've just updated parseUri. If you haven't seen the older version, parseUri is a function which splits any well-formed URI into its parts, all of which are optional. Its combination of accuracy, flexibility, and brevity is unrivaled.

Highlights:

  • Comprehensively splits URIs, including splitting the query string into key/value pairs. (Enhanced)
  • Two parsing modes: loose and strict. (New)
  • Easy to use (returns an object, so you can do, e.g., parseUri(uri).anchor).
  • Offers convenient, pre-concatenated components (path = directory and file; authority = userInfo, host, and port; etc.)
  • Change the default names of URI parts without editing the function, by updating parseUri.options.key. (New)
  • Exceptionally lightweight (1 KB before minification or gzipping).
  • Released under the MIT License.

Details:

Older versions of this function used what's now called loose parsing mode (which is still the default in this version). Loose mode deviates slightly from the official generic URI spec (RFC 3986), but by doing so allows the function to split URIs in a way that most end users would expect intuitively. However, the finer details of loose mode preclude it from properly handling relative paths which do not start from root (e.g., "../file.html" or "dir/file.html"). On the other hand, strict mode attempts to split URIs according to RFC 3986. Specifically, in loose mode, directories don't need to end with a slash (e.g., the "dir" in "/dir?query" is treated as a directory rather than a file name), and the URI can start with an authority without being preceded by "//" (which means that the "yahoo.com" in "yahoo.com/search/" is treated as the host, rather than part of the directory path).

Since I've assumed that most developers will consistently want to use one mode or the other, the parsing mode is not specified as an argument when running parseUri, but rather as a property of the parseUri function itself. Simply run the following line of code to switch to strict mode:

parseUri.options.strictMode = true;

From that point forward, parseUri will work in strict mode (until you turn it back off).

The code:

// parseUri 1.2.2
// (c) Steven Levithan <stevenlevithan.com>
// MIT License

function parseUri (str) {
	var	o   = parseUri.options,
		m   = o.parser[o.strictMode ? "strict" : "loose"].exec(str),
		uri = {},
		i   = 14;

	while (i--) uri[o.key[i]] = m[i] || "";

	uri[o.q.name] = {};
	uri[o.key[12]].replace(o.q.parser, function ($0, $1, $2) {
		if ($1) uri[o.q.name][$1] = $2;
	});

	return uri;
};

parseUri.options = {
	strictMode: false,
	key: ["source","protocol","authority","userInfo","user","password","host","port","relative","path","directory","file","query","anchor"],
	q:   {
		name:   "queryKey",
		parser: /(?:^|&)([^&=]*)=?([^&]*)/g
	},
	parser: {
		strict: /^(?:([^:\/?#]+):)?(?:\/\/((?:(([^:@]*)(?::([^:@]*))?)?@)?([^:\/?#]*)(?::(\d*))?))?((((?:[^?#\/]*\/)*)([^?#]*))(?:\?([^#]*))?(?:#(.*))?)/,
		loose:  /^(?:(?![^:@]+:[^:@\/]*@)([^:\/?#.]+):)?(?:\/\/)?((?:(([^:@]*)(?::([^:@]*))?)?@)?([^:\/?#]*)(?::(\d*))?)(((\/(?:[^?#](?![^?#\/]*\.[^?#\/.]+(?:[?#]|$)))*\/?)?([^?#\/]*))(?:\?([^#]*))?(?:#(.*))?)/
	}
};

You can download it here.

parseUri has no dependencies, and has been tested in IE 5.5–7, Firefox 2.0.0.4, Opera 9.21, Safari 3.0.1 beta for Windows, and Swift 0.2.

177 thoughts on “parseUri 1.2: Split URLs in JavaScript”

  2. @yonathan garti, the easiest way to deal with this is to URL-encode the @ sign as %40. You can see a few people including myself discussing this issue in earlier comments. I plan to correct this in future versions of the script, but haven’t gotten around to it yet. You could try simply changing each instance of [^:@] to [^:@?]. That might do the trick, though I haven’t fully evaluated its impact.

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  8. I needed to get the file name and extension so I added this before returning the info in the function.

    var file_pieces = uri[o.key[11]].split(‘.’);
    if ( file_pieces.length > 1 )
    {
    uri.file_ext = file_pieces[file_pieces.length – 1];
    file_pieces.splice(file_pieces.length – 1, 1);
    }
    uri.file_name = file_pieces.join(‘.’);

  9. Hi Steven,
    I have tried replacing [^:@] to [^:@?] in both strict and loose mode and i was able to parse the URL containing @ correctly.

    Thanks for the script.

    –Ramesh

  10. this is sweet, i’m focusing on javascript nowadays and your code amazed me, pretty light and effective. thanks!

  11. Hello,

    Sorry but your code break with this valid flickr url: “http://www.flickr.com/photos/9242564@N07/5934435067/”.

    It has problems with “@” char.

  13. The handling of query strings seems wrong – e.g parse(‘http://example.com/?q=space%20space’).queryKey[‘q’] will return “space%20space”, not “space space” as it ought to be.

    If you’re turning query keys into a parameter map (rather than leaving them as a raw string), both keys and values should be URI-decoded.

  14. Hi Steven,
    thank you for this very helpful script and putting it under MIT license.
    Please consider removing all the spam comments since August 1.
    Looking forward to the next version of parseUri.
    Regards

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