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

js-uri (available on Google Code) takes a string URL and resolves a URI object from it:

var some_uri = new URI("http://www.example.com/foo/bar");

alert(some_uri.authority); // www.example.com
alert(some_uri);           // http://www.example.com/foo/bar

var blah      = new URI("blah");
var blah_full = blah.resolve(some_uri);
alert(blah_full);         // http://www.example.com/foo/blah

Answer 2

var getLocation = function(href) {
    var l = document.createElement("a");
    l.href = href;
    return l
}
var l = getLocation("http://example.com/path");
console.debug(l.hostname)
>> "example.com"
console.debug(l.pathname)
>> "/path"