Parse URL into just domain name with Javascript

Question

I'm looking for a lightweight way to parse a URL and extract just the domain name. The URL may be different is certain cases but I would always like the same result, for instance:

www.mysite.com  --->   mysite
mysite.staging.blahblah.stuff.com:8080   --->  mysite
mysite.net  --->  mysite

'mysite' will always be part of the URL and would never have more than one dot before it.

Do you really want mysite in the 2nd example? I'd think you would want "stuff" — Jeremiah Orr, Jan 21 '14 at 17:34
... in which case, it's rather direct - take all the non-dot symbols preceding the last dot. Or as simple as `.match(/[^.]+(?=.[^.]+$)/)` — raina77ow, Jan 21 '14 at 17:35
I absolutely would need 'mysite' out of every example - it will be compared against a list of possible values for a match. — flyagaricus, Jan 21 '14 at 17:41
Arg this is absolutely not a duplicate question `domain` name is different to `host` name. `app.mysite.com` is a hostname vs `mysite.com` is a domain name. Subtle but HUGE difference. — Glen Thompson, Feb 25 '20 at 22:22

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 21 '14 at 17:42

You can use the location.host native javascript object to get the host portion of the url then you can pass that into a helper function to split it up on the period. The first item in the array produced by the split should be what you are looking for. However, if www is part of the url what you are looking for will be the second item.

 parseURL(location.host);

 function parseURL(host) {
     var hostParts = host.split(".");
     if (hostParts[0] == "www") {
         return hostParts[1];    
     }
     return hostParts[0];
}

Thanks - this seems to do the trick :) – flyagaricus Jan 21 '14 at 19:27 — flyagaricus, Jan 21 '14 at 19:27

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 21 '14 at 18:33

Perhaps it would be better to reverse the problem -- check each of the possible values against the hostname:

for ( i = 0; i < sitenames.length; i++ ) {
    if ( location.host.indexOf(sitenames[i]) >= 0 ) {
        sitename = sitenames[i];
        break;
    }
}

Parse URL into just domain name with Javascript

2 Answers2