PARSE_URL

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

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

http://uname:passwd@somehost.com:80/path/page.pl?p1=v1&p2=v2  
|1 |   | 2 | | 3  | |    4      ||5 |     6    | |   7     |

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.

Syntax

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

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.

Examples

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

PRO ParseUrlExample  

; 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 

END

Version History


6.4	Introduced