PHP: Parse a URL and return its components

Description

mixed parse_url ( string $url [, int $component ] )

This function parses a URL and returns an associative array containing any of the various components of the URL that are present.

This function is not meant to validate the given URL, it only breaks it up into the above listed parts. Partial URLs are also accepted, parse_url() tries its best to parse them correctly.

Parameters

url: The URL to parse

component: Specify one of PHP_URL_SCHEME, PHP_URL_HOST, PHP_URL_PORT, PHP_URL_USER, PHP_URL_PASS, PHP_URL_PATH, PHP_URL_QUERY or PHP_URL_FRAGMENT to retrieve just a specific URL component as a string.

Return Values

On seriously malformed URLs, parse_url() may return FALSE and emit a E_WARNING. Otherwise an associative array is returned, whose components may be (at least one):

scheme - e.g. http
host
port
user
pass
path
query - after the question mark ?
fragment - after the hashmark #

If the component parameter is specified a string is returned instead of an array.

ChangeLog

Version Description

5.1.2 Added the component parameter

Examples

Example #1 A parse_url() example


<?php

$url = 'http://username:password@hostname/path?arg=value#anchor';



print_r(parse_url($url));



echo parse_url($url, PHP_URL_PATH);

?>

The above example will output:

Array
(
    [scheme] => http
    [host] => hostname
    [user] => username
    [pass] => password
    [path] => /path
    [query] => arg=value
    [fragment] => anchor
)
/path

Notes

Note: This function doesn't work with relative URLs.

Note: This function is intended specifically for the purpose of parsing URLs and not URIs. However, to comply with PHP's backwards compatibility requirements it makes an exception for the file:// scheme where tripple slashes (file:///...) are allowed. For any other scheme this is invalid.

parse_url