parse URL with JavaScript or jQuery

Question

Ok lets say I have a URL

example.com/hello/world/20111020 (with or without the trailing slash). What I would like to do is strip from the url the domain example.com. and then break the hello world 20111020 into an array. But my other problem is. Sometimes the URL has no /hello/world/20111020 or just /hello/ so I need to first determine if there is anything after example.com if there not, then do nothing as obviously there's nothing to work with. However if there is something there for each / I need to add it to this array in order. So I can work with the array[0] and know it was hello.

I tried something a couple days back but was running into issues with trailing slashes it kept breaking the script, I unfortunately abandoned that idea. And today I am looking for fresh ideas.

Answer 1

This should work

var url = 'example.com/hello/world/20111020/';
//get rid of the trailing / before doing a simple split on /
var url_parts = url.replace(/\/\s*$/,'').split('/'); 
//since we do not need example.com
url_parts.shift(); 

Now url_parts will point to the array ["hello", "world", "20111020"].