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/subdirec tory/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.

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.

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

Version History


6.4	Introduced