Very often you need to be able to pull out parts of the information that is contained within a URL. Like the port, the protocol, etc.

This is where the parse_url function is so handy.

Let’s look at the following code:

  $url_info = parse_url('http://username:password@www.phpdeveloping.co.za:80/directory/?arg=value#anchor');  
  print_r($url_info);

The output will be something like:

Array  
(  
  [scheme] => http  
  [host] => www.phpdeveloping.co.za 
  [user] => username  
  [pass] => password  
  [path] => /directory  
  [port] => /80  
  [query] => arg=value  
  [fragment] => anchor  
)