Parsing URL in PHP using parse_url()

To parse a URL with PHP, you need to use the built-in parse_url() function.

The parse_url() function takes a URL string and returns an associative array containing the URL’s components.

The syntax of the function is as follows:

parse_url(
    string $url,
    int $component = -1
): int|string|array|null|false

The parse_url() function accepts two parameters:

The required $url string to parse
The $component integer tells the function to retrieve a specific URL component (optional)

Here’s an example of calling the parse_url() function:

<?php

$url = parse_url("https://sebhastian.com/php-parse-url");
print_r($url);

// 👇 output
// Array
// (
//     [scheme] => https
//     [host] => sebhastian.com
//     [path] => /php-parse-url
// )

The above code shows how parse_url() returns an associative array of three elements: the scheme, host, and path elements.

Depending on your URL form, the function can return the elements below:

scheme
host
port
user
pass
path
query
fragment

You can select a specific component as follows:

PHP_URL_SCHEME
PHP_URL_HOST
PHP_URL_PORT
PHP_URL_USER
PHP_URL_PASS
PHP_URL_PATH
PHP_URL_QUERY
PHP_URL_FRAGMENT

Here’s an example of retrieving only the URL’s host:

<?php
echo parse_url(
    "https://sebhastian.com/php-parse-url",
    PHP_URL_HOST
);

// 👇 output:
// sebhastian.com -> string

The component you wish to retrieve will be returned as a string except for PHP_URL_PORT which will return an int.

When the component doesn’t exist, the function returns null.

For more information and examples, you can visit the parse_url documentation.

Now you’ve learned how to parse a URL using PHP. Good work! 👍

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