Parse a URL and return its components

# parse_url

(PHP 4, PHP 5, PHP 7, PHP 8)

parse_url — Parse a URL and return its components

### Description

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

This function parses a URL and returns an associative array containing any of the various components of the URL that are present. The values of the array elements are not URL decoded.

This function is not meant to validate the given URL, it only breaks it up into the parts listed below. Partial and invalid URLs are also accepted, parse_url() tries its best to parse them correctly.

Caution

This function does not follow any established URI or URL standard. It will return incorrect or non-sense results for relative or malformed URLs. Even for valid URLs the result may differ from that of a different URL parser, since there are multiple different URL-related standards that target different use cases and that differ in their requirements.

Processing an URL with parsers following different URL standards is a common source of security vulnerabilities. As an example, validating an URL against an allow-list of acceptable hostnames with parser A might be ineffective when the actual retrieval of the resource uses parser B that extracts hostnames differently.

The Uri\Rfc3986\Uri and Uri\WhatWg\Url classes strictly follow the RFC 3986 and WHATWG URL Standards respectively. It is strongly recommended to use these classes for all newly written code and to migrate existing uses of the parse_url() function to these classes, unless the parse_url() behavior needs to be preserved for compatibility reasons.

### Parameters

`url`

  The URL to parse.

`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 int).

### 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 int, 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. As of PHP 8.0.0, parse_url() distinguishes absent and empty queries and fragments:

    http://example.com/foo → query = null, fragment = null
    http://example.com/foo? → query = "",   fragment = null
    http://example.com/foo# → query = null, fragment = ""
    http://example.com/foo?# → query = "",   fragment = ""

Previously all cases resulted in query and fragment being `null`.

Note that control characters (cf. ctype_cntrl()) in the components are replaced with underscores (`_`).

### Changelog

Version | Description
--- | ---
8.0.0 | parse_url() will now distinguish absent and empty queries and fragments.

### Examples

Example #1 A parse_url() example

`<?php
$url = 'http://username:password@hostname:9090/path?arg=value#anchor';
var_dump(parse_url($url));
var_dump(parse_url($url, PHP_URL_SCHEME));
var_dump(parse_url($url, PHP_URL_USER));
var_dump(parse_url($url, PHP_URL_PASS));
var_dump(parse_url($url, PHP_URL_HOST));
var_dump(parse_url($url, PHP_URL_PORT));
var_dump(parse_url($url, PHP_URL_PATH));
var_dump(parse_url($url, PHP_URL_QUERY));
var_dump(parse_url($url, PHP_URL_FRAGMENT));
?>`

The above example will output:

    array(8) {
      ["scheme"]=>
      string(4) "http"
      ["host"]=>
      string(8) "hostname"
      ["port"]=>
      int(9090)
      ["user"]=>
      string(8) "username"
      ["pass"]=>
      string(8) "password"
      ["path"]=>
      string(5) "/path"
      ["query"]=>
      string(9) "arg=value"
      ["fragment"]=>
      string(6) "anchor"
    }
    string(4) "http"
    string(8) "username"
    string(8) "password"
    string(8) "hostname"
    int(9090)
    string(5) "/path"
    string(9) "arg=value"
    string(6) "anchor"

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 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.

### See Also

- pathinfo() - Returns information about a file path
- parse_str() - Parse a string as a URL query string
- http_build_query() - Generate URL-encoded query string
- dirname() - Returns a parent directory's path
- basename() - Returns trailing name component of path
- » RFC 3986

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