Is JavaScript able to to parse arbitrary URLs the same way the current URL is parsed in windows.location?

Question

I like that the current address is nicely split up into sections in window.location, but I would like to be able to take an arbitrary URL and split it up following the exact same logic. I don't know how window.location handles corner cases and rare scenarios, so I would like to avoid doing this manually if possible. Since the browser is already doing this work on the current address I'm hoping it contains a function that can do it to any address.

If there are any nice cross-browser libraries (perhaps jQuery plugins) out there I'd love to hear about them too.

Answer 1

Using the info in Xander's answer I've written a small function that parses an URL and returns an object with the desired information. I thought I'd share it here:

function parse_url(url)
{
    var e = document.createElement('a');
    e.href = url;

    return {
        'protocol': e.protocol,
        'hostname': e.hostname,
        'host': e.host,
        'port': e.port,
        'pathname': e.pathname,
        'search': e.search,
        'hash': e.hash
    }
}

Answer 2

You could create an a (HTML Anchor Element) element in JavaScript and specify the href attribute. Then you'll be able to call the properties associated with an anchor element, hash, protocol, host, port etc...

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/DOM/HTMLAnchorElement