How do I parse a URL into hostname and path in javascript?

Question

I would like to take a string

var a = "http://example.com/aa/bb/"

and process it into an object such that

a.hostname == "example.com"

and

a.pathname == "/aa/bb"

Answer 1

The modern way:

new URL("http://example.com/aa/bb/")

Returns an object with properties hostname and pathname, along with a few others.

The first argument is a relative or absolute URL; if it's relative, then you need to specify the second argument (the base URL). For example, for a URL relative to the current page:

new URL("/aa/bb/", location)

In addition to browsers, this API is also available in Node.js since v7, through require('url').URL.