PHP Manual: Parse a URL and return its components

Description

mixed parse_url ( string $url [, int $component = -1 ] )

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. Invalid characters are replaced by _.

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 (except when PHP_URL_PORT is given, in which case the return value will be an integer).

Return Values

On seriously malformed URLs, parse_url may return FALSE.

If the component parameter is omitted, an associative array is returned. At least one element will be present within the array. Potential keys within this array are:

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

If the component parameter is specified, parse_url returns a string (or an integer, in the case of PHP_URL_PORT) instead of an array. If the requested component doesn't exist within the given URL, NULL will be returned.

Changelog

Version	Description
5.4.7	Fixed host recognition when scheme is omitted and a leading component separator is present.
5.3.3	Removed the `E_WARNING` that was emitted when URL parsing failed.
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

Example #2 A parse_url example with missing scheme


<?php
$url = '//www.example.com/path?googleguy=googley';

// Prior to 5.4.7 this would show the path as "//www.example.com/path"
var_dump(parse_url($url));
?>

The above example will output:

array(3) {
  ["host"]=>
  string(15) "www.example.com"
  ["path"]=>
  string(5) "/path"
  ["query"]=>
  string(17) "googleguy=googley"
}

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 triple slashes (file:///...) are allowed. For any other scheme this is invalid.

parse_url