PARSE_URL

The PARSE_URL function breaks a URL string into substrings that correspond to the URL_* properties of IDLnet* objects.

Note: This is not an object method and does not set any object properties.

Note: If a port number is not found in the URL string parameter, the default port value is 80.

PARSE_URL is a pure string-processing routine. Validation of the values is left to the user. The returned value is a structure created by applying the following rules to the input URL string:

URL Index	URL Section	Example	Rule
0	Scheme	“http”, “https”, or “ftp”	From beginning of URL string up to (but not including) “://”
1	Username	anonymous	If ‘@’ is present before the first single ‘/’, everything from “://” to either ‘:’ or ‘@’ if ‘:’ is not present
2	Password	make-something-up	If both ‘@’ and ‘:’ are present before the first single ‘/’, everything from ‘:’ to ‘@’
3	Host	somehost.com	Everything from “://” or ‘@’ to ‘:’ or first single ‘/’
4	Port	80	If ‘:’ follows the host name, everything between ‘:’ and the first single ‘/’
5	Path	directory/subdirectory/index.html	Everything between the first single ‘/’ and ‘?’ or end of string
6	Query	parm1=value1&parm2=value2	Everything from ‘?’ to the end of the string

URL string components are illustrated in the following example:

http://uname:passwd@somehost.com:80/path/page.pl?p1=v1&p2=v2

| 0 |  | 1 | | 2  | |     3    ||4|     5      | |    6    |

This routine is written in the IDL language. Its source code can be found in the file parse_url.pro in the lib subdirectory of the IDL distribution.

Examples

The following example strips a known URL to its component strings.

; Start with a hypothetical URL string 
urlString = 'http://someserver.com/path/to/firstfile.dat' 
PRINT, 'Original URL string = '+urlString 
; Split the URL into its component substrings 
urlComponents = PARSE_URL(urlString) 
; Populate an IDLnetURL object with the URL information 
urlObj =OBJ_NEW('IDLnetURL') 
urlObj->SetProperty, URL_SCHEME = urlComponents.scheme, $ 
   URL_HOST = urlComponents.host, $ 
   URL_PATH = urlComponents.path 
; Get the object's URL property values, and print them 
urlObj->GetProperty, URL_SCHEME = urlScheme 
urlObj->GetProperty, URL_HOST = urlHost 
urlObj->GetProperty, URL_PATH = urlPath 
PRINT, 'URL scheme = '+urlScheme
PRINT, 'URL host = '+ urlHost
PRINT, 'URL path = '+urlPath

Syntax

Result = PARSE_URL(URL)

Return Value

PARSE_URL returns an anonymous structure containing the disassembled segments of the URL. The fields in the structure are:

SCHEME

USERNAME

PASSWORD

HOST

PORT

PATH

QUERY

All fields contain string values.

To see the structure tag names, enter the following code in the IDL command line:

help, Result, /struct

Arguments

URL

A URL in string form.

Keywords

None.

Version History

6.4	Introduced