URL Parser

About This Tool

So, you’ve got a URL—maybe from a log file, a user input, or just something you copied off the web—and you need to break it down. Not just look at it, but actually understand what each part means. That’s where a URL parser comes in. It’s not magic, but it’s close. Think of it like a Swiss Army knife for web addresses. You throw a messy or complex URL at it, and it hands back clean, labeled pieces: protocol, domain, path, query parameters, fragment—whatever’s there.

I’ve used a bunch of these tools over the years, and most are either overkill or too basic. Some try to do everything—validate, redirect, sanitize—while others just split strings and call it a day. This one? It’s straightforward. It parses. That’s it. No fluff. If you need more, you build on top of it. Simple.

Key Features

• Breaks down any standard URL into its core components—scheme, host, port, path, query, and fragment.
• Handles edge cases like missing protocols, default ports, and encoded characters without crashing.
• Returns query parameters as a clean object or dictionary, so you don’t have to manually split and decode.
• Works with both absolute and relative URLs, because let’s be honest, not every link starts with “https://”.
• Lightweight and fast—no dependencies, no bloat. Just parse and go.
• Available in multiple languages (JavaScript, Python, etc.), so you can use it wherever your code lives.

FAQ

Q: Does it validate URLs, or just parse them?
A: It parses. If you feed it garbage like “htp:/broken-url”, it’ll still try to make sense of it, but it won’t say “hey, this is invalid.” That’s on you. If you need validation, pair it with a regex or a dedicated validator. Parsing and validating are different jobs.

Q: What about international domains or weird encodings?
A: Yes, it handles percent-encoded characters (like %20 for spaces) and decodes them properly. For international domains (like .рф or .中国), it assumes they’re already in Punycode if needed—most modern systems handle that before the URL even reaches your parser. Just don’t expect it to translate Cyrillic for you.