Why use url.parse(req.url).pathname

[Hardik Ruparel]

In many open source projects, I've seen the following code being used
to extract the requested pathname from URL (eg: to extract /about from
http://example.com/about)

var url = require('url');
...
//after creating server
var path = url.parse(req.url).pathname

But, req.url already contains /about. Why convert it into a URL object
and re-extract the pathname ?

I'm new to Node and it just struck me as something I should get to the
bottom of..
Thanks,

Hardik Ruparel

[mscdex]

On Apr 26, 7:03 am, Hardik Ruparel <hardik...@gmail.com> wrote:
> But, req.url already contains /about. Why convert it into a URL object
> and re-extract the pathname ?

Most likely because other things can exist in the url request, such as
the `search`/`query` portion. Using pathname allows you to easily
disregard that extra information for some urls.

[Isaac Schlueter]

Yes, mostly it's to discard the query params.

But also, request.url MAY actually contain the whole url. This is
allowed anywhere (though discouraged, and web browsers generally don't
do this) and is required for proxy requests.

Lastly, a request url MAY contain a hash fragment, though curl is the
only browser that I've seen send the hash fragment to the server.
Generally browsers strip it off.

Urls are ugly. You gotta clean em up first.

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[Hardik Ruparel]

Thanks guys, that cleared it up !!